Conville & Walsh
literary agency
The Breaking of Eggs
- Author: Jim Powell
- Category: Fiction Debut Literary
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
- Pub date: 11 March 2010
- Length: 352 pages
About The Breaking of Eggs
It is an intelligent novel, unafraid to tackle its subject matter of the alienation and suffering of those whose lives were disrupted by the Second World War, and down-to-earth, touching and funny
- Paul Torday, author of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
Set in 1991, our narrator Feliks Zhukowski, a displaced Polish Communist living in Paris, lies in his sick bed being tended to by his landlady of forty years, Madame Lefèvre. As they embark on their first ever conversation, Feliks surprises himself by revealing that Paris is not where he considers home and indeed that he has no idea where home for him would be. Separated from his family as a child when the Nazis invaded Poland, Feliks has spent his life producing a travel guide to Iron Curtain countries for Western readers. However, following the collapse of Communism in 1989 and the imminent retirement of his long-term publisher, Feliks finds himself tipped into a maelstrom which he cannot avoid.
As he journeys for the first time to America to sell his travel guide there, Feliks is reunited with his half-brother, Woodrow, who no longer considers himself a Pole but rather an American and nothing more. Feeling his own alien status ever more acutely, Feliks has a growing desire to discover the fate of others from his past and finds that his beliefs may not be based on truth but rather dictated by the enormities of history’s events.
Raising the question of what home is for those displaced by war, THE BREAKING OF EGGS has been compared to The Lives of Others, Salmon Fishing in Yemen and Goodbye Lenin!
About the Author
Jim spent his early career heading one of London’s largest advertising agencies. He then started a ceramics business producing tableware for The Conran Shop, Heal’s and Bloomingdales. Jim has always been active in politics, fighting the 1987 General Election in Coventry and acting as a speechwriter to three cabinet ministers. He was also a District Councillor for ten years and deputy leader of Daventry District Council.
On a more trivial level, Jim’s first holiday job was working as an office boy for the Beatles; he was one of the first interviewees of Jeremy Paxman (a contemporary of his at Cambridge); he has co-written and appeared in a pilot comedy series for the BBC; and he is a qualified county football coach.
Now in his 50s Jim lives in Northampton but travels regularly to London. He is currently starting work on book two.