| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Gingerbread Woman for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
In The Gingerbread Woman, Jennifer Johnston again demonstrates her ability to create memorable and affecting characters. Clara, who at 35 makes her living doing "odd jobs for newspapers", is recovering from a serious operation and spends her days wandering around the cliff tops at Dublin Bay. Like the The French Lieutenant's Woman, she stares out to sea, trying to rediscover the direction in her life. One rainy afternoon, she encounters Laurence (Lar), a teacher who has run away from his life in Northern Ireland as he tries to come to terms with a family tragedy. The novel describes how these two unconventional people form a fragile friendship.
Alternating the narrative voice, Johnston lets their stories unravel gradually. Both characters are trying to come to terms with loss and the novel examines the contrasting ways they cope: Clara is self-depreciating and humorous but can't shake off the knowledge that haunts her; Lar is bitter and coiled, bottling up his pain in an ever-present anger. Johnston has no difficulty in keeping the reader intrigued as the plot is never a foregone conclusion.
The Gingerbread Woman is a short book but not a light read--it investigates loss, tragedy, loneliness and apparent hopelessness but does not weigh the reader down in doing so. It also considers the complexities of emotions not always recognised or voiced and their impact on everyone involved. This is a book that lingers. --Christina McLoughlin
Product Description
On a rainy afternoon on Killiney Hill a young man walking, without his overcoat, happens upon a woman gazing out over Dublin bay, standing perilously close to the edge. From their testy encounter develops a remarkable friendship which will enable each to face afresh their very different, damaged pasts, and to look, however tentatively, towards the future.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"The Gingerbread Woman" clearly demonstrates Jennifer Johnston's experience as a consummate storyteller. She deals compassionately with the difficult themes of death and disease, weaving a surprisingly fast paced (very little actually happens) and compelling narrative. The characters are carefully crafted and though the reader may not like either of the main characters in their often self-indulgent pity and grief, Johnston nonetheless makes their lives both accessible and commanding of the reader's attention.
This would be a great book for any book club to discuss, as there are plenty of moral questions raised. Set in Ireland and New York, the novel provides a careful commentary on the question of adultery and lust and raises the idea of the responsibilities of terrorists. Both difficult concepts are dealt with sympathetically by Johnston, leaving the reader with no easy answers.
The narrative is very clever, with the novelist within the novel exploring her past whilst coming to terms with her present. Johnson's description of the past and the passionate love affair is wonderfully evocative and maintains the reader's interest.
The end of the novel is a little frustrating; another book club debate could revolve around when the reader guesses the outcome! And I was also a little dissatisfied with the moral message of adultery leading to heartache and ultimately punishment for the protagonist. Nonetheless this is a beautifully written book; I read it in one sitting and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. Having never encountered Johnson before I will certainly search out her other novels as both her style and her themes provide the reader with food for thought, an element sadly lacking in a number of recent best sellers.
This would be a great book for any book club to discuss, as there are plenty of moral questions raised. Set in Ireland and New York, the novel provides a careful commentary on the question of adultery and lust and raises the idea of the responsibilities of terrorists. Both difficult concepts are dealt with sympathetically by Johnston, leaving the reader with no easy answers.
The narrative is very clever, with the novelist within the novel exploring her past whilst coming to terms with her present. Johnson's description of the past and the passionate love affair is wonderfully evocative and maintains the reader's interest.
The end of the novel is a little frustrating; another book club debate could revolve around when the reader guesses the outcome! And I was also a little dissatisfied with the moral message of adultery leading to heartache and ultimately punishment for the protagonist. Nonetheless this is a beautifully written book; I read it in one sitting and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. Having never encountered Johnson before I will certainly search out her other novels as both her style and her themes provide the reader with food for thought, an element sadly lacking in a number of recent best sellers.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I've had Jennifer Johnston's early novels on my shelves for years - since they were first published in the early 1970s in fact - but it was this book which set me re-reading those stories, and buying some more recent ones. The plot of The Gingerbread Woman is simple: two people with tragic back-stories meet by chance and, without realising it, set each other on the road to at least partial recovery. The treacheries that cause their separate unhappiness are quite different, but the processes of adjustment which the protagonists have to go through are touchingly similar. The moral is that time is a great - but not complete - healer. A lovely book.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book, set in Dublin, is the story of Clara and Lar, two people who are trying to deal with their sad, tragic pasts.
Lar has tried to run away from his past and the death of his wife and child in a car crash. Clara, on the other hand, tries to deal with her horrible past, a tragic relationship, by writing a book about it, entitled 'The Gingerbread Woman' (hence the title).
These two characters meet by chance, at Killiney Hill, and develop a special friendship.
Johnston looks at various themes in the book, such as; how tragedy effects people, the ways in which people deal tragedy, communication, relationships and love.
The author also skilfully gives the audience a deep insight into her realistic characters. One of the most original ways in which she does this is, of course, through Clara's novel.
This use of meta-fiction is extremely effective because as well as giving the reader an insight into Clara's character, it makes the book ever more interesting by giving it two plots.
The book is extremely sad, but it does offer hope in the end, as the characters begin to rise out of the depression of their pasts, and look to the future.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Gingerbread with no spice.
I liked it but...
For a while I couldn't be sure what to make of this one.
I do like Johnston's style very much but for some reason the message of this book was a little... Read more
For a while I couldn't be sure what to make of this one.
I do like Johnston's style very much but for some reason the message of this book was a little... Read more
Published 1 month ago by J. Wilkin
Loss and redemption in Dalkey
Jennifer Johnston has said that in a hundred years she hopes that people will say of her that she accurately and truthfully depicted the lives on Protestants in twentieth-century... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Alexis Paladin
the gingerbread woman
I really understood the parental relationalship and it helped me to see my mother in a new light. the book was well written and well constructed and I thought it ended well... Read more
Published 9 months ago by s.m.mccormack
Shallow and unbelievable
Written in a succession of short sentances for those with attention span problems, I found this a trite, unbelievable and shallow novel. Read more
Published 10 months ago by K. Byatt
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
