Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0330330284
• ISBN13: 9780330330282
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Picador
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.

Customer Reviews

There is nothing serene about worlds colliding

Serenity House is an "eventide refuge", an old peoples home. It is also an allegory for two seemingly different worlds: the Magic Kingdom Florida, USA and the Concentration Camps of 1939-45, Europe. Max Montfalcon, claims to be English through and through - but is he? Being an inmate of Serenity House, put there by his daughter Lizzy and son-in-law Albert Turbeville, MP, his ramblings about Poland, Germany, Camps and a certain Maximillian von Falkenberg do not rouse suspicion in either family or staff until on day Jack appears on the scene. Jack has come all the way from Florida with the sole intention to find Max and to cash in on his past as a anthropologist in Nazi-Germany - made known to Jack by letters and certain gruesome "war mementos". Jack joins the staff at Serenity House and just as easily joins in at the dubious goings-on there, which somehow appear closer to practices of the Camps than those of the Magic Kingdom, despite Jack's Micky Mouse costume. Old and New World, Past and Present collide - or do they run in parallel? Whichever way they cause conflict and a big hunt begins that leaves casualties on boths sides. Is it a Nazi-hunt or a Mouse-hunt, though? Christopher Hope presents the horrors of the holocaust as well as the horrors of our modern consumer and entertainment society, which somehow do not seem to be worlds apart. Serenity House is an exciting and worrying book. It grips you and makes you think about past and present and their old and new diguises. There is nothing 'serene' about this book and it definately deserves to get back into print!!