Big Fish
-
-
2.7 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- £5.99
Publisher Description
** A MAJOR TIM BURTON FILM starring Ewan Mcgregor and Jessica Lange **
** COMING SOON AS A MUSICAL starring Kelsey Grammer **
Do you ever really know your father?
Like many sons, William Bloom never really knew his father. Edward told him stories too incredible to believe about his exploits as a younger man, but any attempt to find out serious truths have been met with laughter and brush-offs. And that never mattered. But now Edward is dying, suddenly it matters a great deal.
So William sets out to tell his father's story, as he imagines it. He tames a giant, is dragged by an enormous fish through a lake and escapes a purgatory of lost dreams. Through legends and myths, William makes Edward into a true Big Fish.
The much beloved book by Daniel Wallace is soon to be a Christmas musical at The Other Palace in London.
Praise for Big Fish:
'Both comic and poignant' New York Times
'An audacious, highly original debut novel. . . An imaginative, and moving, record of a son’s love for a charming, unknowable father' Kirkus Reviews
'Refreshing, original. . . Wallace mixes the mundane and the mythical. His chapters have the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale' Publishers Weekly, starred review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction," writes Wallace in his refreshing, original debut, which ignores the conventional retelling of the events and minutiae of a life and gets right to the poetry of a son's feelings for and memories of his father. William Bloom's father, Edward, is dying. He dies in fact in four different takes, all of which have William and his mother waiting outside a bedroom door as the family doctor tells them it's time to say their goodbyes. He intersperses the four takes with stories (all filtered through William's mind and voice) about the elusive Edward, who spent long periods of time on the road away from home and admitted once to his son that he had yearned to be a great man. The father and son deathbed conversations have son William playing earnest straight man, while his father is full of witticisms and jokes. In a plainspoken style dotted with transcendent passages, Wallace mixes the mundane and the mythical. His chapters have the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale, and the novel's roomy structure allows the mystery and lyricism of the story to coalesce. FYI: Wallace is an illustrator who designs T-shirts, refrigerator magnets and greeting cards.
