Oxygen: Man Booker Prize Shortlisted British Literature – An Intimate Novel of Three Men and Last Chances

Oxygen: Man Booker Prize Shortlisted British Literature – An Intimate Novel of Three Men and Last Chances

It is the summer of 1997. Alec Valentine is returning to England to care for his ailing mother, Alice, a task that only reinforces his deep sense of inadequacy. In San Francisco, his older brother Larry prepares to come home as well, preoccupied with an acting career that is sliding toward sleaze and a marriage that is faltering. In Paris, on the other hand, the Hungarian playwright Lászlo Lázár seems to have it all--critical acclaim, a loving boyfriend, and a close circle of friends--yet even he is haunted by guilt and tragedy. For each of them the time has come to assess the turns taken, the opportunities missed. And for each there will be one last chance to break free from the past and find redemption in a moment of clarity and courage. Andrew Miller has given us an intimate, compelling meditation that evokes an extraordinary range of emotions and insights-- Oxygen lives and breathes beyond the final page. PRAISE FOR OXYGEN "It grabs your attention to the last page."-- Daily Express (UK) "An admirably restrained piece of writing, tender, funny, witty, profound. Oxygen confirms Miller's exceptional gifts and leaves one gasping for more." -- The Sunday Herald (UK) PRAISE FOR INGENIOUS PAIN "Miller's genius is that there is . . . a surprise in nearly every sentence, and sometimes a miracle, too."-- The Boston Globe "Exquisitely detailed...A real talent." --Entertainment Weekly It is the summer and Alec Valentine is returning to England to care for his ailing mother, Alice. In San Francisco, his older brother Larry prepares to come home as well, preoccupied with an acting career that is sliding toward sleaze and a marriage that is faltering. In Paris, on the other hand, the Hungarian playwright Lászlo Lázár seems to have it all--critical acclaim, a loving boyfriend, and a close circle of friends--yet even he is haunted by guilt and tragedy. For each of them the time has come to assess the turns taken, the opportunities missed, and the advent of one last chance to break free from the past and find redemption. Intimate, compelling and evocative of an extraordinary range of emotions and insights, Oxygen lives and breathes beyond the final page. A Whitbread Award finalist "Elegantly written . . . an exhilarating journey through personal histories and a knowing glimpse at the ways we hold ourselves responsible for saving the people we love." --People "Poignant, probing...grounded in a vivid sense of place and character, and enlivened by a sly, stoical wit that keeps cropping up where you least expect it. A bold, bracing book." --The Chicago Tribune "Lovely, striking, strange, evocative. " --The Washington Post Book World Born in England in 1960, Andrew Miller has lived in Spain, Japan, Ireland, and France. His first novel, Ingenious Pain, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the International IMPAC Award. He lives in London. ANDREW MILLER's novel Ingenious Pain won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the International IMPAC Award. He was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award for his novel Oxygen . Oxygen By Andrew Miller Harvest/HBJ Book Copyright © 2003 Andrew Miller All right reserved. ISBN: 0156027402 Chapter One Inside the house his father's clocks were striking the hour. Faintly, the chimes carried to where he stood in the garden, a lank young man in a summer sweater and shapeless blue trousers, wiping the lenses of his glasses with the corner of a crumpled handkerchief. He had spent the last hour with the hose watering the flower-beds and giving the ground around the younger trees a good soaking, as he had been instructed to. Now, having carefully coiled the hose, he made his way back towards the house, his progress shadowed by a cat that pushed through the stems of delphiniums and peonies and oriental poppies. At the top of the house, the light in Alice's room shone dully from between half-open curtains.     It was the dusk of his third day back at Brooklands, the house in the West Country with its grey stone walls, brown-tiled roof and rotting summerhouse, where he had spent the first eighteen years of his life. His own small flat in London was shut and locked, and his neighbour, Mr Bequa, whose clothes carried their own atmosphere of black tobacco and failed cooking, had agreed to forward the mail, though there would not be much. Bequa had even come down into the street to wave him off, and knowing where he was going and why, had done so with gestures of extravagant melancholy, ? ?Goodbye, Alec friend! Good heart! Goodbye!?     Wandsworth Bridge, Parsons Green, Hammersmith. Then west along the M4 past out-of-town superstores and fields of rape. A journey he had made so many times since Alice was first diagnosed he often completed the entire trip in a daze of inattention, startled to find himself rounding the last corner by the poultry farm, the sky ahead of him falling in luminous sheets towards the estuary and W