Mrs. Engels: A Novel - Couverture souple

McCrea, Gavin

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1936787296 ISBN 13 : 9781936787296

Editeur : Catapult, 2015

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

In September 1870 a train leaves Manchester bound for London. On board is Lizzie Burns, a poor worker from the Irish slums, who is embarking on the journey that will change her forever. Sitting in the first-class carriage beside her lover, the wealthy mill-owner Frederick Engels, the vision of a life of peace and comfort takes shape before her eyes: finally, at nearly fifty, she is to be the lady of a house and the wife to a man. Perhaps now she can put the difficulties of the past behind her, and be happy?

In Gavin McCrea's stunning debut novel, we follow Lizzie as the promise of an easy existence in the capital slips from her view, and as she gains, in its place, a profound understanding of herself and of the world. While Frederick and his friend Karl Marx try to spur revolution among the working classes, Lizzie is compelled to undertake a revolution of another kind: of the heart and the soul. Haunted by her first love (a revolutionary Irishman); burdened by a sense of duty to right past mistakes; and torn between a desire for independence and the pragmatic need to be taken care of, Lizzie learns, as she says, that the world doesn't happen how you think it will. The secret is to soften to it, and to take its blows.

Wry, astute and often hilarious, Lizzie is as compelling and charismatic a figure as ever walked the streets of Victorian England, or its novels. In giving her renewed life, Gavin McCrea earns his place in the pantheon of great debut novelists.

Revue de presse :

'This whirlwind of politics and personalities might become dizzying were it not stabilised by Lizzie's unmistakable voice. She begins life by grabbing what she needs in order to survive; she ends it having achieved deep self-knowledge. She tells her own story with a fierce wit and trenchancy, shot through with poetry ... McCrea's fictional speculation makes a fine symphony out of the silence that surrounds Lizzie Burns.' --Helen Dunmore, The Guardian

'An assured, beautifully-written debut, about a woman wiser than her lover perhaps, and slowly growing into herself reminiscent of Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Eleanor Marx wrote that Lizzie was 'illiterate and could not read or write, but she was true, honest and in some ways as fine-souled a woman as you could meet'. Going by this, McCrea describes her perfectly.' --The Spectator

'In Mrs Engels, Lizzie Burns, an Irish-woman from Manchester, narrates the story in her own, deliberately non-modern idiom ... Lizzie provides an irreverent working-class take on all the intellectual posturing going on ... Gavin McCrea is triumphant in his exuberant debut in creating Lizzie's voice; she is dazzlingly convincing. Voices that feel authentic to their period and yet brim with life and verve are so rare that Mrs Engels is my book of the month.' --The Times

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Catapult
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1936787296
• ISBN 13: 9781936787296
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 368