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The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders, a sensitive young man, and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed with a void in place of the central character if, indeed, the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms.

Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its...

Orlando is destined to live for four hundred years . . . During the Elizabethan era, the young courtier Orlando becomes a lover to the aging Queen and embarks on an intense affair with the beautiful Russian Princess Sasha. Yet while Orlando can fulfill most of his desires, he never quite seems to fit in. Then one night, Orlando falls into a deep sleep and awakes transformed, emerging as a woman in eighteenth-century London. Orlando must now inhabit a very different life, dealing with matters of dress, sex and marriage. But will she arrive in the twentieth century as an individual who has, at...