A Partisan's Daughter [Import] [Hardcover]

Louis de Bernieres (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 11, 2008

Set in North London during the Winter of Discontent, A Partisan’s Daughter features the relationship between Chris, an unhappily married, middle-aged Englishman and Roza, a young Serbian woman who has recently moved to London.

While driving through Archway in the course of his job as a medical rep, Chris is captivated by a young woman on a street corner. Clumsily, he engages her in conversation, and he secures an invitation to return one day for a coffee.

His visits become more frequent and Roza starts to tell him the story of her life, drawing him increasingly into her world – from her childhood as a daughter of one of Tito’s Partisans through her journey to England and on to her more recent colourful and dangerous past in London.

A Partisan’s Daughter is about the power of storytelling. It is also a beautifully wrought and unlikely love story which is both compelling and moving to read. Here is another wonderful novel from the author of the bestselling Birds Without Wings and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

De Bernières (Corelli's Mandolin) delivers an oddball love story of two spiritually displaced would-be lovers. During a dreary late 1970s London winter, stolid and discontented Chris is drawn to seedy and mysterious Roza, a Yugoslav émigrée he initially believes is a prostitute. She isn't (though she claims to have been), and soon the two embark on an awkward friendship (Chris would like to imagine it as a romance) in which Roza spins her life's stories for her nondescript, erstwhile suitor. Roza, whose father supported Tito, moved to London for opportunity but instead found a school of hard knocks, and she's all too happy to dole out the lessons she learned to the slavering Chris. The questions of whether Roza will fall for Chris and whether Chris will leave his wife (he calls her the Great White Loaf) carry the reader along, as the reliability of Chris and Roza, who trade off narration duties, is called into question—sometimes to less than ideal effect. The conclusion is crushing, and Chris's scorching regret burns brightly to the last line. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Though it treads little new ground, this lingering account of a tortured love affair—"a [gripping] study in frustration, both sexual and romantic" (London Times)—also meditates on the art and power of storytelling and the myths of East versus West. However, critics observed that de Berni√®res spends a great deal of time on Roza's Yugoslavian yarns, which are largely irrelevant to the plot, and not enough on Chris and Roza. They also found fault with these relatively unsympathetic characters: several dismissed the exotic Roza as a stereotype; some considered Chris a colorless Everyman; and others a perverted, "self-pitying creep" (Telegraph). While A Partisan's Daughter fails to measure up to the much-loved Corelli's Mandolin, this unsettling novel will entertain de Berni√®res fans who don't expect a repeat performance.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Knopf Canada (March 11, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307396916
• ISBN-13: 978-0307396914
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,106,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Louis de Bernieres was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book Eurasia Region in 1991 and 1992, and for Best Book in 1995. He was selected by Granta as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993, and lives in Norfolk, East Anglia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tale of Two People, May 24, 2008

By 

sb-lynn (Santa Barbara, California United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: A Partisan's Daughter (Hardcover)

I have always been a big fan of Louis de Bernieres, and I am happy to say this newest book doesn't disappoint. Note that this is a quick read - you can easily read it in one sitting.

Summary, no spoilers.

This story is told in short chapters, narrated by the two main characters - Chris, a lonely man who lives with a passionless wife he calls The "Great White Loaf", and by Roza, a young woman he meets on the street and propositions, under the mistaken belief that she was working as a prostitute. Well, she wasn't. At least not at that time.

This unlikely couple end up meeting and having regular talks at Roza's dilapidated home, where she tells him stories about her life. We wonder if Roza is an unreliable narrator, but we want to believe her, and so does Chris. Her stories charm Chris, so much so that he begins to fall for Roza, and he craves her company and fantasizes about making her his lover. He is falling in love with her, and she seems to be caring for him, too, despite her tales getting wilder and more sordid.

No spoilers - but we know early on that these characters do not end up together, and that this is the cause of quite a bit of regret. By the end of the book, we find out why, and what happened.

I enjoyed the book a great deal. It can be very funny at times, and yet there are also some horrendous things that happen, in particular to young Roza as a young girl. This story tells us something about lost opportunities, and about living life to the fullest.

Recommended.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Partisan's daughter, a so-so story, May 26, 2009

By 

Martine Glasscott "bookworm" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Partisan's Daughter (Paperback)

I have read all of Louis de Bernieres books, but I think he wrote this one because he was short of money. Compared to "Birds without Wings", e.g. this is not up to his usual standard.
A man, unhappy in his marriage, listens to the stories of a Serbian woman and becomes more and more enchanted with her. We don't know if these stories are real or if she makes them up in order to show, or satisfy a craving for an exciting past.
In any case, he believes her. I found it rather tedious and even the few shocking bits came across as "oh well, what else is new?"
Not one of my favorite Bernieres.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lovely writing but what is the point of this book?, January 16, 2010

By 

Liz E. (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Partisan's Daughter (Vintage International) (Paperback)

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this book - like other reviewers said, to me it mainly seemed meaningless! It was a very frustrating read, and an unrewarding one. Maybe I'm just missing the point, but I think that might be because, if there is one, the point is buried under a story that is much too convoluted and long.
The other thing that really bothered me was Roza's discontinuity. I know we're supposed to be very skeptical of her, but more than that I was skeptical the author's portrayal of her - it seemed to me that Roza, as a character, kept shifting, and not in a good way. Her first-person narrative sometimes differed from what she told Chris, and this made plenty of sense. But then, it seems that not only do we have to distrust everything she said to Chris, but also everything she says to us. I mean, was she a prostitute or wasn't she? She tells it to us both ways. In the beginning, the prostitution was a lie meant to shock Chris, in the ending she narrates (to us, not Chris) her life of sex for money in a totally convincing, emotional way - and I don't know what to make of that. Why should I care about a character that doesn't seem to actually exist? There isn't even enough of a "real" Roza on the page for me to buy "Roza the lier" - I don't buy her existence at all. Chris was interesting but his role was quite small, so I felt invested in neither of them, and I think that is probably the reason that this book was, for me, so very boring.
I think I only finished it because I got strung along on the quality of the writing. The writing was enough to get me really excited about this book... but never for longer than 15 minutes, and pretty soon it was just a drag to the last page while I was asking myself why didn't I just give it up. Maybe it was the lack of characterization, maybe that there wasn't really much of a story? In any case, I do not recommend this book.