Learwife
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2021
'Seductive . . . Gorgeous' The Times
'Gives voice to one of fiction's most conspicuously absent women' i
Word has come. King Lear is dead. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear’s queen.
Though her grief and rage threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she exiled? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend? And what will become of her now? To find peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice – one upon which her destiny rests.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
King Lear remains one of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, yet the same can hardly be said about his wife—a forgotten character whose story is all but unknown. Learwife—the astonishing debut from J.R. Thorp, written over the course of six years—finally gives her a voice. The (unnamed) queen has been living in a nunnery for the last 15 years, exiled for a crime neither she nor we understand. As this novel opens, she learns of the deaths of King Lear and her three daughters, her grief threatening to shatter her, alongside the realisation that she may finally be released from her imprisonment. This is a novel about a stunningly complex character as she investigates and reflects on what she might possibly have done to deserve her fate. The true pleasure of this novel, however, is the stunningly immersive, intense and lyrical prose in which it’s told, and which will undoubtedly earmark Thorp as one of 2021’s finest debut talents.
