From the Dust Returned
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Enter the strange world of the Elliott family: it will change you forever…
They have lived for centuries in a house of legend and mystery in upper Illinois – and they are not like other midwesterners. Rarely encountered in daylight hours, their children are curious and wild; their old ones have survived since before the Sphinx first sank its paws deep in Egyptian sands. And some sleep in beds with lids.
Now the house is being readied in anticipation of the gala homecoming that will gather together the far-flung branches of this odd and remarkable family where they will mix their arcane skills and lifestyles, fall in and out of love and change the world around them forever.
You have never seen their like before.
Reviews
'Let us now praise Ray Bradbury, the uncrowned poet laureate of science fiction.' The Times
'It is impossible not to admire the vigour of his prose, similes and metaphors constantly cascading from his imagination' Spectator
‘Bradbury is an authentic original’ Time Magazine
‘No other writer uses language with greater originality and zest. he seems to be a American Dylan Thomas – with discipline’ Sunday Telegraph
About the author
One of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of all time, Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920. He moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1934. Since his first story appeared in Weird Tales when he was twenty years old, he published some 500 short stories, novels, plays, scripts and poems. Among his many famous works are Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. Ray Bradbury died in 2012 at the age of 91.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If there's a fountain of youth, Bradbury has found it. In the 1940s, at the start of his extraordinary writing career, Bradbury produced a series of popular fantasy short stories about the Elliot family, an assortment of vampires and other odd creatures of various degrees of humanity living in a Victorian castle in the golden Indiana of his youth. More than half a century later, he has fashioned from these stories a novel, funny, beautiful, sad and wise, to rank with his finest work. Full of wide-eyed wonder and dazzling imagery, the stories retain as an integrated whole all their original freshness and charm. The plot is simplicity itself: the vampires and their weird kin gather for a homecoming and share memories. Among them are Timothy, a foundling, whose pet spider is named Arach (originally Spid), and Cecy, immobile in bed but able to enter the minds of others and control their actions. Once, Cecy got a young woman to treat an unwanted but worthy suitor more politely than she would have otherwise: "Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist's wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: 'Thank you.' " Einar, a winged man, acts as a kite for children, writing "a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!" Most memorable of a remarkable cast are A Thousand Times Great Grand-M re, who had been "a pharaoh's daughter dressed in spider linens," and her husband, Grand-P re, who after four thousand years still has ideas. "At your age!" she snaps. This book will shame the cynics and delight the true believers who never lost faith in their beloved author. FYI:Last fall Bradbury received the National Book Foundation's 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
