The growing relationship between two very different individuals--Ralph Messenger, the director of the Holt Belling Center for Cognitive Science and expert on artificial intelligence, and Helen Reed, a recently widowed novelist--is chronicled in the alternating voices of the two characters. By the author of Therapy. 100,000 first printing.
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From the Inside Flap:
Ralph Messenger is a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. Approaching his fiftieth birthday, he has good reason to feel pleased with himself. As Director of the prestigious Holt Belling Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Gloucester, he is much in demand as a pundit on developments in artificial intelligence and the study of human consciousness ? ?the last frontier of scientific enquiry.? He enjoys an affluent lifestyle subsidized by the wealth of his American wife, Carrie. Known to colleagues on the conference circuit as a womanizer and to Private Eye as ?Media Dong,? he has a tacit understanding with Carrie to refrain from philandering in his own back yard.
This resolution is already weakening when he meets and is attracted to Helen Reed, a distinguished novelist still grieving the sudden death of her husband more than a year ago. She has rented out her London house and taken up a post as writer-
in-residence at Gloucester University, partly to try and get over her bereavement.
Fascinated and challenged by a personality radically at odds with her own, Helen is aroused by Ralph?s bold advances, but resists on moral principle. The stand-off between them is shattered by a series of events that dramatically confirms the truth of Ralph?s dictum, ?We can never know for certain what another person is thinking.?
About the Author:
David Lodge is the author of twelve novels and a novella, including the Booker Prize finalists Small World and Nice Work. He is also the author of many works of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction and Consciousness and the Novel.
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- PublisherViking Adult
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 0670899844
- ISBN 13 9780670899845
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages288
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