The Barrowfields
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
'A beautiful, evocative novel with an amazing sense of place and an understated, dark sensibility. A brilliant debut. I loved it!' Jenni Fagan, author of The Panopticon
Mesmeric in its prose and mythic in its sweep, THE BARROWFIELDS is an extraordinary debut about the darker side of devotion, the limits of forgiveness, and the reparative power of shared pasts.
Just before Henry Aster's birth, his father, a frustrated novelist and lawyer, reluctantly returns to the remote North Carolina mountains in which he was improbably raised and installs his young family in a gothic mansion - nicknamed 'the vulture house' - worthy of his hero Edgar Allan Poe. There, Henry grows up under the desk of this fierce and brilliant man. But when a death in the family tips his father toward a fearsome unravelling, what was once a young son's reverence is poisoned, and Henry flees, not to return until years later when he, too, must go home again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this charming, absorbing, and assured debut novel, a young man tries to make sense of his father's life and the passions that unite them namely, a devotion to literature and a rueful nostalgia for their Appalachian homeland. In the novel's sweeping opening, the narrator, Henry Aster, describes how his father, also named Henry, briefly escaped his hometown of Old Buckram, N.C., to attend college and pursue soaring literary ambitions, convinced that "inside him was something magnificent." After marrying and gaining a law degree, though, the elder Henry learned that his mother is ill, and he returned to Old Buckram, where, following a bout of professional success, he bought a sinister-looking hilltop mansion known as "the vulture house." There, he raised his family and toiled away endlessly on a mysterious, Casaubon-esque work of literature. Younger Henry relates all this years later, sometime in the '90s, after having followed a very similar trajectory: he too, after gaining a law degree, has found himself back in Old Buckram. But his father is gone, the rest of his family is in shambles, and his girlfriend the aptly if cutely named Story has her own family problems to sort out. Lewis evokes his settings beautifully, and his prose is bracingly erudite. This debut has the ability to fully immerse its readers.
