The Porpoise
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3.9 • 25 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
‘Just downright brilliant... a transcendent, transporting experience’ Observer
A motherless girl grows up in isolated luxury, hidden from the world by her wealthy father. She believes their life together is normal – but as time passes, she has a growing sense that something between them is very wrong.
She cannot escape, so she seeks solace in her books. Her favourite tales are those that conjure ancient worlds – of angry gods and heroic mortals, one of whom will some day come to her rescue.
Soon, she will forget where the page ends and her mind begins.
‘A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery’ Max Porter
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) is an artfully crafted story of layered lives. Uberwealthy Philippe finds out his wife, Maja, has died in a plane crash, though the baby she was carrying, Angelica, is saved. Philippe's grief takes a darker, sexual turn, and he begins molesting Angelica when she's a young girl. Their reclusive existence is eventually intruded upon by a young man named Darius, who arrives with a business proposition for Philippe when Angelica is 16. Angelica sees the young man as her savior, until Philippe attacks him and drives him away; Darius escapes to a ship called the Porpoise. The tale then shifts into mythical territory, transmogrifying Darius into Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and his adventures mostly mirroring those depicted in the play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which is at least partially attributed to Shakespeare take him through ocean voyages and fierce battles. As the novel moves back and forth between present and past, female characters of Pericles's story are sometimes depicted as distant relatives of Angelica, and her modern-day traumas with Philippe are woven throughout, building both story lines to startling, disparate conclusions. Haddon's ambitious tale captures the ethos of tragic Shakespearean vibrations and the tangle of lives that magically intersect. The prose is exquisite and elevates this story that blends reality and mythology to great effect.
