Larchfield: The moving, gripping and wonderful debut about finding human connection - Couverture souple

Clark, Polly

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1786481952 ISBN 13 : 9781786481955

Editeur : riverrun, 2018

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

Larchfield is that rarest of rare first novels - a book that actually achieves its great ambition. I found it so immensely readable; it's brainy, verbally acute and knowing, with an ingenious literary historical premise that it impressively (and artfully) carries off right in front of your eyes. It's work of considerable talent (Richard Ford)

This is a mysterious, wondrous, captivating book (Louis de Bernieres)

Magical and transcendent . . . I suspect that few debuts in 2017 will match the elegance of Larchfield. This is a beautiful novel: passionate, lyrical and surprising. I will remember Larchfield for a long time. (John Boyne Irish Times)

Larchfield is beautifully eloquent about that quotidian kind of courage that so often goes overlooked: that fortitude that allows us to engage compassion through our loneliness, and to construct a future in which our truest selves might fit. (Jim Shepard)

A story beautifully and passionately rendered (Margie Orford)

Wonderful characters and set pieces (Di Speirs)

The sense of danger hanging over the characters kept me reading until past midnight (Marina Lewycka)

A deft and moving portrayal of isolation (Juliet Mushens)

Brava brava! Most satisfying thing I've read this year. Beautiful. (Brian Chikwava)

A fine novel of rich mysteries. What an original way to explore the assembling or collapse of identity; the reader has a powerful sense of a kind of vortex into which the two main characters are drawn - with a masterly stroke of unexpected impossibility standing in for a moment of mental collapse. I was riveted. (John Fuller)

Présentation de l'éditeur :

'Mysterious, wondrous, captivating' Louis de Bernieres

'We need the courage to choose ourselves' W. H. Auden

It's early summer when a young poet, Dora Fielding, moves to Helensburgh on the west coast of Scotland and her hopes are first challenged. Newly married, pregnant, she's excited by the prospect of a life that combines family and creativity. She thinks she knows what being a person, a wife, a mother, means. She is soon shown that she is wrong. As the battle begins for her very sense of self, Dora comes to find the realities of small town life suffocating, and, eventually, terrifying; until she finds a way to escape reality altogether.

Another poet, she discovers, lived in Helensburgh once. Wystan H. Auden, brilliant and awkward at 24, with his first book of poetry published, should be embarking on success and society in London. Instead, in 1930, fleeing a broken engagement, he takes a teaching post at Larchfield School for boys where he is mocked for his Englishness and suspected - rightly - of homosexuality. Yet in this repressed limbo Wystan will fall in love for the first time, even as he fights his deepest fears.

The need for human connection compels these two vulnerable outsiders to find each other and make a reality of their own that will save them both. Echoing the depths of Possession, the elegance of The Stranger's Child and the ingenuity of Longbourn, Larchfield is a beautiful and haunting novel about heroism - the unusual bravery that allows unusual people to go on living; to transcend banality and suffering with the power of their imagination.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: riverrun
• Date d'édition: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1786481952
• ISBN 13: 9781786481955
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368