Isn’t it supposed to be Spring already? Around me there are a lot of contradictory signs: blooming magnolia trees (I love those!) yet sudden showers and grey skies. Streets lined with wild cherry trees in delicate pink blossoms close to my office, yet a real snowstorm this weekend to celebrate Easter!

This is definitely a weather to stay indoor, sipping hot tea and enjoying a good book… And here’s my plan for you all. Following some postal mistake, I’ve received 2 copies of Iris, by John Bayley, a loving account of Iris Murdoch’s life seen by her husband.

If you’re interested, dear readers, I’m offering my one extra copy. Just drop me a line in the comments (or through the e-mail address on the links if you’re a shy lurker) to tell me why you’d like to read this book, and on April 5th, I’ll make a lucky draw to designate the winner. 

Here are a few lines of the book to make you curious about it:

Already we were beginning that strange and beneficent process in marriage by which a couple can, in the words of A.D. Hope the Australian poet, ‘move closer and closer apart’. The apartness is a part of the closeness, perhaps a recognition of it: certainly a pledge of complete understanding. There is nothing threatening or supervisory about such an understanding […] The solitude I have enjoyed in marriage, and I think Iris too, is a little like having a walk by oneself, and knowing that tomorrow, or soon, one will be sharing it with the other, or equally perhaps again having it alone. It is a solitude, too, that precludes nothing outside the marriage, and sharpens the sense of possible intimacy with things or people in the outside world.