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Afternoon Reading: The Foxes Come at Night

Afternoon Reading: The Foxes Come at Night: Episode 1: Gondolas

The Foxes Come at Night

Episode 1

Episode 1: Gondolas

Gondolas

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A photograph taken 40 years ago stirs powerful memories on a Venetian canal bank.

A photograph taken 40 years ago stirs powerful memories on a Venetian canal bank. Read by Ian McDiarmid.

Now in his eightieth year, Cees Nooteboom is one of Holland's leading and most respected authors, a writer of both novels and travel books and a consummate short story writer. The Foxes Come at Night, his recent collection, has won the 2010 Gouden Uil - the most prestigious literary award in Flanders and is now published in English.
The collection is set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, territory Nooteboom knows well. The stories are linked by their meditations on memory and age, on love won and lost and on the fragments of life treasured in a photograph or a detail.
In 'Gondolas' a fine art dealer finds the past stirred by a photograph taken on the same Venetian canal bank forty years ago. In 'Thunderstorm' a couple's own fissures are reflected in a horrific moment on a beach. And in 'Late September' a woman waits on a windblown Spanish cafe terrace before the inevitable conclusion to her lonely day.
Written with haunting attention to detail and pitch perfect prose, sensitively translated by Ina Rilke, these stories show one of the European masters of the genre at his best.
Reader Ian McDiarmid
Abridger Sally Marmion
Producer Di Speirs.

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Short stories set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, by Cees Nooteboom

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Episode 1: Gondolas

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