Eveless Eden

Someone sent this book up to my house for me to read and to be honest I put off readng it. The back of the book doesn't give the story justice so I threw it to the side and read other books instead. I recently rediscovered this book in a quest to find something new to read. I read the first page and then I couldn't put the book down. I was caught up in the story and the conversational way in which the book was written really made me engage with the main character. I have never heard of this author before in my life but I am so impressed by this book I am going to search the library for other works of hers. This book is amazing - a love story caught up inside a gruesome guessing game.

I loved this book. It's totally different from John Dollar (which I also loved); reminded me somewhat of a Nick Hornby read. Funny, sad, and passionate. Wiggins' prose is exquisite.

This is the best book I have read this year. Stylistically brilliant, scintillant, it searches into the nature of love and the obsessions of of eros -- not in daily life, but in life on the edge, life where politics, catastrophe, and the twentieth century converge. Wiggins' protagonist is a journalist -- male -- who covers international events of major magnitude; set alternately in Africa, at the (falling)Berlin wall, and in 'liberated' Eastern Europe, the book is a serious inquiry intot he relations between eros and ethos. The characters are riveting, the settings full of the excitement and confusion of the late twentieth centurty -- and the prose, the prose is a continual joy. Only a slight falling off at the end -- the book gets into so much that it is tough for Wiggins to extract herself and the reader from the fullness -- mars what is otherwise a wondrous book for our times.

See my review under the paperback edition. Though for the price differential, the harcover edition is a bargain