Crusoe's Daughter
-
-
4.5 • 11 Ratings
-
-
- £3.99
Publisher Description
'Touching, terribly sad, funny: a smashing novel' The Times
In 1904, six-year-old Polly Flint is sent by her sea captain father to live with her two holy aunts in a house by the sea on England's northeast coast. The house is so close to the sea it seems to toss like a ship, and so isolated, she might be marooned on an island.
There Polly lives for 81 years, while the century rages around her and Victorian order becomes nuclear dread. Through it all, she returns again and again to the story of Robinson Crusoe, who, marooned like her, fends off the madness of isolation with imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Polly Flint, the central figure in this civilized English novel, is six years old as it opens in 1904, an old woman at its end, in 1985her mind and imagination filled with the presence of her heroic exemplar, Robinson Crusoe. Installed by her seafaring father in a big yellow house in Yorkshire under the care of two pious aunts, she spends her life in and near that spot. Once she loved a young poet who died in the Great War; later there was a German-Jewish refugee who placed his daughters in Polly's care before he died. Events occur undramatically, related with equal weight no matter what their relative significance. Companionable though it is, the novel lacks urgency; even when Polly speaks directly with Crusoe, they exchange tepid, truistic remarks about the nature of memory and fiction, memoir and imagination. Then he is gone and the tale ends as quietly as it began. Gardam's award-winning books include God on the Rocks and The Pangs of Love.
