Nell Leyshon's Top 3 Books

Nell Leyshon's dramaturgical vein naturally overflowed into a novel with that point of scripted lives to be displayed on tables made of paper.

Intimacy with fulfilled claims; essential immortality that permeates the things, the rooms, the roads and paths of some English countryside. Life is basically that stage where the characters move, declaim, overact if necessary and ultimately live the dress rehearsal. Just before a work that will never be performed, as the novels of Milan Kundera.

Precisely tangible characters, full of tact. But also ultimately felt in its version of souls and shadows that inhabit the places that have not yet been devoured by the future. With that hint of melancholy that everything decadent has, if the value of any perishable human destiny is coldly analyzed.

For this reason, the question, the effort to provide an existence with substance, is only achieved in literature whatever its form. And little can immortalize the merely chronic. What remains intrahistorical, the future of the characters in the appropriate time. To write about the past is to revive silenced voices forever. That is Nell Leyshon's mission and faith she achieves it in every one of her books...

Top 3 Recommended Nell Leyshon Novels

The color of milk

There are those who exist and those who live. Of those who only exist, great stories cannot be told. Those who live, on the other hand, provide that Homeric point that shows us tragedies where great little heroes are forged in search of their return home, if there is a home, or the discovery of some new Ithaca, if there is Ithaca. .

Elias Canetti wrote that on the rare occasions when people manage to free themselves from the chains that bind them, they tend to be subject to new ones immediately afterwards. Mary, a fifteen-year-old girl living with her family on a farm in rural England in the 1830s, has milk-colored hair and was born with a physical defect in her leg, but manages to momentarily escape her family doom when she is sent to work as a maid to care for the vicar's wife, who is ill. Then she has a chance to learn to read and write, to stop seeing "just a bunch of black lines" in books. However, as she leaves the world of shadows, she discovers that the lights can be even more blinding, so Mary is left with only the power of telling her story to try to find solace in the written word.

In The Color of Milk, Nell Leyshon has recreated an overwhelming microcosm with tragic beauty, populated by characters like Mary's father, who curses life for not giving him sons; Grandpa, who feigns illness to see his beloved Mary one more time; Edna, the vicar's maid who keeps three shrouds under her bed, one for her, and the others for a husband and a son she doesn't have by her; all this, framed by a bucolic environment that flows to the rhythm of the seasons and the work of the farm, which comes to life with a heartbreaking innocence thanks to Mary's determination to leave a written testimony of the acquired destiny, which she no longer has the possibility to give up

The color of milk

The forest

There is a strange and even sinister contrast in those childhood robberies that happen everywhere. It can be a simple exercise of animosity from the vision of other children; or a war that destroys everything. The question is to address the paradoxical situation and confront that childhood unable to find itself in the mirror of its circumstances. Empathy from the bowels to recover traces of humanity, if we have any left.

In a Warsaw occupied by the German army, little Paweł – imaginative, curious and impressionable – grows up protected in the familiar environment of his home, surrounded by women: his maternal grandmother, his aunt Joanna and, above all, his mother Zofia, a a woman torn between love for her son and sorrow for the loss of independence that motherhood imposes on her, alienating her from her cello, from her longed-for readings and, ultimately, from her most intimate self.

For Paweł, that home is his world, and he is about to lose it. One night, his father, a member of the resistance, brings home a critically wounded British pilot, setting off a chain of events that will force mother and son to flee and hide in the woods.

The Forest, Nell Leyshon

the singing school

England, 1573. Little Ellyn's days are spent working from sunup to sundown on her family's humble farm, shoveling animal feces and receiving scorn and beatings from her brother Tomas. Since her father was disabled in an accident, and even more so now that a new little sister, Agnes, has arrived in this world of misery and deprivation, everyone has to break even more to ensure a livelihood.

In this atmosphere of brutality, fatigue and filth, Ellyn's only joy is Agnes, with whom she is united by a very special bond. Everything will take an unexpected turn the day Ellyn goes to the market and, pushed by her curiosity, she enters an empty church where she hears a song like she has never heard before, a song that shakes her, that makes it float

From that precise moment a powerful desire begins to grow inside him: to enter the singing school, where young gentlemen learn to sing, but also to read and write, a place where one never goes hungry and where, however, the girls access is denied. Her determination to fulfill her dream will lead Ellyn to rebel and pose as a boy, but how long can she keep her deception up? How much can she bear those shackles imposed on the truth of her body?

Written with a formidable talent for reflecting the speech of a girl raised in a rural environment and transmitting with such a personal language an energy, a freedom and a vision of things of enormous poetic breath, The singing school narrates the path without turning back of an illiterate girl who discovers that the world is much larger than she ever suspected, a beautiful and unjust world in which a gift can take you very far and prejudice condemns you for life; a world that must be changed, whatever it may be, to bequeath it to those we love most.

the singing school
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