Putney
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
'Among the hottest books of this blazing summer' (Daily Telegraph): a bold, lushly written novel that will compel and disquiet in equal measure
A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 - CHOSEN BY THE OBSERVER, NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR
It is the 1970s and Ralph, an up-and-coming composer, is visiting Edmund Greenslay at his riverside home in Putney to discuss a collaboration. Through the house's colourful rooms and unruly garden flits nine-year-old Daphne – dark, teasing, slippery as mercury, more sprite than boy or girl. From the moment their worlds collide, Ralph is consumed by an obsession to make Daphne his.
But Ralph is twenty-five and Daphne is only a child, and even in the bohemian abandon of 1970s London their fast-burgeoning relationship must be kept a secret. It is not until years later that Daphne is forced to confront
the truth of her own childhood – and an act of violence that has lain hidden for decades.
Putney is a bold, thought-provoking novel about the moral lines we tread, the stories we tell ourselves and the memories that play themselves out again and again, like snatches of song.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this incendiary story of sexual obsession and abuse from Zinovieff (The Mad Boy), it's love at first sight for composer Ralph Boyd when he meets entrancing Daphne Greenslay. The problem is he's 27 and she's nine. They are introduced at her family's house in Putney, in Southwest London, when Ralph is hired by Daphne's novelist father, Edmund, to write the score for a play based on his most famous novel, Oedipus Blues. It's the 1970s and rich, successful Edmund's idea of parenting is relaxed, to say the least. In this permissive environment, well-evoked by Zinovieff, the relationship between Ralph and Daphne secretly flourishes. Ralph eventually marries an age-appropriate woman and has children, but Daphne remains his romantic obsession. Forty years later, Ralph is dying of cancer, and Daphne is a recovering drug addict and single mother to a young daughter. Daphne reconnects with her best friend, Jane Fish, who was a childhood witness to her relationship with Ralph and nudges her toward a confrontation with him over the sexual abuse she suffered at his hands. Told from their three vividly established points of view, and traveling back and forth between the 1970s and today, the novel makes a convincing case for how the anything goes ethos of that earlier decade can lead to a reckoning decades later.
