Falcon is a roaring, racy ode to the Swinging Sixties, to a new world of openness, sex, drugs, and jazz, to Oxford intelligentsia and London bohemia, including its criminal underworld and budding gay scene.
The novel’s breathless, page-turning narrative comes enriched by Nina Stanger’s first-hand experience as a key player in London’s 1960s counterculture and is imbued with a tragic pathos stemming from her deep interest in the Romantics and the Aesthetes: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and Oscar Wilde. Rich, layered, and allusive, Falcon is also uproariously funny and engaging, mixing the satirical wit of Kingsley Amis, the emotional nuance of E.M. Forster, and the erotic charge of D.H. Lawrence.
Falcon by Nina Stanger
Genre: Historical Fiction / Romance / LGBT / Thriller / Suspense / Swinging Sixties London
Published: November 2023
Paperback ISBN: 9781739117344
eBook: Amazon HERE Apple Here KOBO HERE SCRIBD HERE
Price: £10.00
About the Author: Nina Stanger
Nina Stanger was a trailblazing civil liberties barrister and author who lived in London in the 1960s and 70s. She achieved tabloid fame for defending the downtrodden and social pariahs: political protestors, squatters, and terrorists, in cases such as the Miss World bombing and the Angry Brigade. She was known for her beauty, intelligence, and bohemian, flamboyant style.
The Seventies saw the resurgence of the Haldane Society as a meeting place for progressive lawyers. As an organisation it had gone through a moribund period but was revitalised by a new generation including Stanger who wanted a serious discourse about the role of lawyers of the Left in making the law accessible to those who were disadvantaged. Stanger was an active member and her contributions to debate were delivered with great precision and dry wit, informed by her passion for civil liberties rather than rigid ideologies, which she deplored. She had an exquisite voice which she used to great effect, especially with judges, and abundant blonde hair which looked glorious even under the barrister's wig.
In 1987 she moved to Florence, Italy, where she surrounded herself in art history and comparative legal studies, focusing on preserving the institution of trial by jury which was up for debate in Europe at the time. Nina tragically died in 1999 of a pulmonary embolism, but not before completing her first novel, Falcon with a follow-up to come in 2024 as well.
Praise for: Falcon
"It’s the Swinging Sixties, and the English have never had it so good- or so often. At Oxford (where else?) the scions of the ruling class explore new freedoms of the head and the heart and the body, heedless of the psychosis that awaits. Nina Stanger’s delightful and insightful revisit to Brideshead, a few decades on, shows what has changed - and what never will.” Geoffrey Robertson, KC
Raves for: Nina Stanger
"An entertaining corrective to standard accounts of the 1960s. London may have been swinging, but as this novel shows, it did so to CIS male standards."⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Stewart Home, author of 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess"A genuinely fun novel."⭐⭐⭐⭐ Cian McCourt, Verso Books