KINDNESS OF WOMEN, THE - Harper Perennial

The kidness of Women continues the story of the boy whose life in Japanses-occupied Shanghai was described so memorably in Empire of the Sun, and sets those traumatic events within the context of a lifetime. We follow the narrator, Jim, to English after the war. He tries and fails to find stability as a medical student at Cambridge and a trainee RAF pilot in Canada. Then, after settling happily into family life, his worlds is ripped apart by domestic tragedy. He plunges into the merlstrom of the '60, an instigator and subject of every aspect of cultural, social and sexual experimentation. All this and much more, we see as the attempt of a bruised ming to make sense of the upheaval around it.