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The
2003 Award
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The Leto Bundle by Marina Warner
Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: Chatto & Windus ISBN 0701169206 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| Room
XIX of the Museum of Albion doesn't usually receive many visitors. But one
day a crowd of immigrants and homeless gathers and demands to see a mummy
that has recently been removed. As political pressure builds, the curator
unpacks the tomb and begins to explore its bizarre contents, for herself
and for the passionate young man who has adopted the mummy as the figurehead
of his movement. It contains a bundle of curious objects and documents:
they all tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman, Leto. As Leto moves gradually westwards across the map form her childhood home, she slips through time. On the run, in a far off era of civil strife, she gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, survives in a desert stronghold as the lover of its commander, stows away in a ship loaded with plundered antiquities and then works as a chamber maid in a war-torn city. During a long siege she manages to save her daughter, but loses her son. As the novel sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages, to the treasure-hunting of Victorian Europe, and into the present day, Leto reappears, with her daughter Phoebe, in different guises. Eventually, in today's Albion, Leto becomes a servant in the household of a rock singer; there, she begins to search for her son. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Marina Warner's fiction includes Indigo, The Lost Father (winner of a Commonwealth Writers' Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), as well as a collection of stories, Mermaids in the Basement. Among her acclaimed studies of myth and fairy tale are Alone of All Her Sex, Monuments and Maidens, From the Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman, and Managing Monsters (the 1994 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio). She has been a Getty Scholar, a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, and gave the Clarendon Lectures on the theme of metamorphosis at Oxford in 2001. She had also been appointed a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts and des Lettres by the French government. |
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