Х. С. Бхабра — последние издания книг

Gestures, the sole novel of an unknown Canadian writer who died tragically in 2000, is the elegant, beautifully crafted, gripping autobiography of one Jeremy Burnham, career diplomat and English gentleman, who in his 83rd year sits down to write his version of political upheavals, emotional displacements and personal losses encountered in a career spent in the "forgotten and superseded sport of diplomacy." His story, which in so many ways captures the flux and turmoil of the last century, begins in Venice in the twenties, just as the Fascists are taking over the government, and ends in war-torn Amsterdam, desperate and destitute after the Allied victory

A beautiful and harrowing reflection on memory and accountability, Gestures is a tale of eloquent and tragic force.

The story begins in 1923. A young and inexperienced Foreign Service officer, Jeremy Burnham arrives in the storied and exotic city of Venice to take up his first post. He falls into a friendship with an attractive older woman, Jane Carlyle, who initiates him into Venetian society and introduces him to the enigmatic Eva von Woerden, and the cosmopolitan Jewish art connoisseur Anthony Manet. The destinies of these four characters become enlaced as Venice and Italy fall under the encroaching shadow of fascism. When one of them is brutally murdered, a chain of events is set off that will climax more than twenty years later in the ruins of post-war Amsterdam, when the lessons of courage and moral responsibility implicit in that earlier death are at last made plain. H. S. Bhabra’s stunning novel is a richly wrought narrative of a world caught in the flux of the twentieth century.