Innovative, erudite and enormously entertaining, Love on the Borders is the work of a unique literary mind: wideranging, encyclopaedic, insightful and enormously readable, it follows spirited 40-something Celestine as she walks the length of Offa's Dyke - the ancient earthwork which traces the boundary between England and Wales - and recalls past passions, conjuring up discarded lovers and imagining what might have been.
An immensely engaging story of love, lust and the power of the imagination, Love on the Borders is also a brilliantly sustained - and highly topical - meditation on the subject of borders in its broadest sense, as Bax's heroine travels the world, as well as the Dyke itself - from Zimbabwe to Jerusalem, from New York to Celestine's childhood India (setting of her mother's appaling murder).
Woven into the narrative, with consummate skill, are fascinating anecdotes and digressions, as well as quotations from a lifetime's reading - including, pivotally, Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, a work which exists in a different kind of borderland altogether, and which, as the novel progresses, assumes increasingly sinister significance...
Love on the Borders is a novel about Britain, its relationship to the wider world and to its constituent parts; about borders and the conflicts they engender and play host to; about the body and its passions, and the liberating powers of the imagination. Audacious, compelling and utterly original, Love on the Borders - and especially Celestine herself - will capture readers' hearts and stimulate their minds.
"Martin Bax has an editor's eye for extracting tantalising texts and Love on the Borders promises to make an intriguing travel companion for anyone seeking literate company on a long summer's ramble"
TLS
"Love on the Borders demonstrates that what matters in this kind of writing is not rigid structure and exact plotting but the articulation of the myriad of ways in which the mind relates to the world."
New Welsh Review
Martin Bax is a world-renowned Consultant Paediatrician, and Editor of the long-running literary journal Ambit. He lives in London and the Welsh Marches.
An immensely engaging story of love, lust and the power of the imagination, Love on the Borders is also a brilliantly sustained - and highly topical - meditation on the subject of borders in its broadest sense, as Bax's heroine travels the world, as well as the Dyke itself - from Zimbabwe to Jerusalem, from New York to Celestine's childhood India (setting of her mother's appaling murder).
Woven into the narrative, with consummate skill, are fascinating anecdotes and digressions, as well as quotations from a lifetime's reading - including, pivotally, Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, a work which exists in a different kind of borderland altogether, and which, as the novel progresses, assumes increasingly sinister significance...
Love on the Borders is a novel about Britain, its relationship to the wider world and to its constituent parts; about borders and the conflicts they engender and play host to; about the body and its passions, and the liberating powers of the imagination. Audacious, compelling and utterly original, Love on the Borders - and especially Celestine herself - will capture readers' hearts and stimulate their minds.
"Martin Bax has an editor's eye for extracting tantalising texts and Love on the Borders promises to make an intriguing travel companion for anyone seeking literate company on a long summer's ramble"
TLS
"Love on the Borders demonstrates that what matters in this kind of writing is not rigid structure and exact plotting but the articulation of the myriad of ways in which the mind relates to the world."
New Welsh Review
Martin Bax is a world-renowned Consultant Paediatrician, and Editor of the long-running literary journal Ambit. He lives in London and the Welsh Marches.