From Amazon.co.uk
John Spoke, famous British author, has since the death of his wife, been left unable to write--that is until his chance meeting on a remote Fijian island with the characters who are to become the protagonists of his new novel. Jostein Gaarder takes his main characters: Ana and Jose, the enigmatic Spanish couple who speak mostly in aphorisms, Frank Anderson, an evolutionary biologist from Norway and Spoke, his author from Croydon, and has them meet in a place of extraordinary natural beauty--a garden of Eden untainted by the eco-pollution of the rest of the planet. In this location the characters are forced to contemplate Man's influence on the world, his place in evolutionary history and his responsibility for the future. Here they connect, exchange philosophies and become entwined in each others' stories.
From Fiji, the action moves to Spain, and the momentum builds. We discover that Ana is in fact a famous flamenco dancing gypsy, and that she bears a striking resemblance to the subject of a painting completed 200 years before her birth: Goya's Maja Nuda. It is also revealed that Ana's life--like that of her ancestors--is punctuated by the appearance of a time-travelling dwarf. These mysteries come as challenges and we are asked to make sense of them.
Maya is a novel with big themes: love, loss, ecology, evolution and consciousness. It is also ambitiously told with its multiple locations and its many narrative voices. But John Sessions handles this well with a pace and style that prevent the listener from losing the action. The novel closes with a puzzle, but also with the recognition that life, while baffling at times, is certainly rich and must be lived fully. --Judith Walters
Book Description
A chance meeting on the Fijian island of Taveuni is the trigger for a fascinating and mysterious novel that intertwines the stories of John Spooke, an English author who is grieving for his dead wife; Frank Andersen, a Norwegian evolutionary biologist estranged from his wife Vera; and an enigmatic Spanish couple, Ana and Jose, who are absorbed in their love for each other. Their stories are so strewn with mysteries and illusions that it is hard to say where one ends and the next begins, or if the accounts the characters give of themselves can be believed. Why does Ana bear such a close resemblance to the model for Goya's famous Maja paintings? What is the significance of the Joker as he steps out of his pack of cards? As the action moves from Fiji to Spain, from the present to the past, unfolding further stories within the stories, the novel reveals an astonishing richness and complexity. Maya debates and unravels the questions that give meaning to the lives of the characters – and to our own. At the same time it explores our ideas of the necessity for love. As bold and imaginative in its sweep as Sophie's World, it shows again that Jostein Gaarder's unique and special gift is to make us wonder at the awe-inspiring mystery of the universe.
