Books by Benjamin Markovits

When the four Essinger children gather in Austin for Christmas, they all bring their news. But their parents have plans, too, and invite Dana to stay, hoping to bring the couple back together.

Over the course of the weekend, several generations of domestic tension are brought to boiling point . Recalling some of America's most celebrated novelists - this is John Updike's Rabbit for a new generation - Benjamin Markovits' writing reminds us of the heights that social realism can reach.

When his former colleague Peter Sullivan dies, the narrator of Childish Loves inherits his life's work - a number of fragmentary manuscripts about the life of Lord Byron. Fascinated by his prose - and intrigued by the rather sinister rumours surrounding Peter's life, including whispers of an inappropriate liaision with a young boy - he has the manuscripts published and then sets out to discover whether the reimagining of Byron's lost memoires can provide a key to Sullivan's own elusive life and tarnished reputation. Acting as a literary sleuth, he sorts through boxes of Sullivan's writing; reads between the lines of his scandalous, Byron-inspired stories; meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead; and tracks down people from Peter's past in an effort to untangle rumour from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and sexual awakening, innocence and attraction, while exploring the lives of three very different writers and their brushes with success and failure in both literature and life.

Ten years out of Yale, with an extra degree from Oxford, and all Greg Marnier has to show for it is a rambling academic career that has landed him in Aberystwyth. At his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk, he runs into an old friend who offers him an extraordinary way out.Robert James, wealthy and influential, a success story of the dotcom bubble, wants to become a political player. His plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit - the poster child for urban decline - and build a new America from their boarded-up ruins. For a small investment, Marnier can transform himself into a twenty-first-century pioneer. The realities of life on America's urban frontier soon become apparent. For every hopeful misfit who's come for a fresh start there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by the new colonials. Marnier finds himself caught in the middle of everyone else's battles - between local and outsider, rich and poor, black and white - until a terrible accident forces him to take sides.

Nineteen-year -old Annabella Milbanke, visiting London for the swirl of parties and engagements of the season, is introduced to Byron at a waltz. He has just published Childe Harold, and is surrounded by a crowd of admirers, one of whom is his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Annabella and Byron fall in love, but Augusta's unwelcome presence in their relationship becomes increasingly unbearable. Caught up in a potentially scandalous love triangle, Annabella must decide whether following her heart is the most dangerous thing she has ever done . . .

In Fall we see the tentative beginnings of an unlikely romance - between schoolteacher Amy and drifting former graduate, Charles. In Winter we hear how her colleague Howard learns, seventeen years too late, that he has a daughter following a brief fling with collegemate Annie. Spring and Summer tell the story of his daughter's friend Rachel's relationships with her literature teacher, Stuart, and her dying father Reuben.Executed with exquisite sympathy, tenderness and emotional nuance, Either Side of Winter is a moving and elegiac picture of people whose lives are inextricably linked by circumstance, community - and a need to be loved.