O Caledonia
The beloved classic, for fans of I CAPTURE THE CASTLE and Shirley Jackson, with an introduction by Maggie O’Farrell
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- € 5,49
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- € 5,49
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'I once decided to become friends with someone on the sole basis that she named O Caledonia as her favourite book' Maggie O'Farrell
'A sparky, funny work of genius and one of the best least-known novels of the 20th Century' Ali Smith
'Funny, surprising, exquisitely written and brilliant on the smelly, absurd, harsh business of growing up. The Brontë sisters and Poe via Dodie Smith and Edward Gorey' David Nicholls
'An absolute sumptuous treat of a book' Elizabeth Macneal
'A wonderful oddity - brief, vivid, eccentric, written with ferocious zest and black humour' Penelope Lively
'The words sing in their sentences' The Times
'The reader feels unalloyed joy on every page' Independent
Vera was painting the pony's hooves gold in the dining room; Janet said this was bad for him; poison would seep into his bloodstream.
At the bottom of a great stone staircase, dressed in her mother's black lace evening dress, twisted in murderous death, lies Janet. So end the sixteen years of Janet's short life.
A life spent in a draughty Scottish castle, where roses will not grow, and a jackdaw decides to live in the doll's house.
A life peopled by prettier, smoother-haired siblings, a Nanny with a face like the North Sea and the peculiar, whisky-swigging Cousin Lila.
A life where Janet is perpetually misunderstood - and must turn from people, to animals, to books, to her own wild and wonderful imagination.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MAGGIE O'FARRELL
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this ebulliently imaginative cross beween bildungsroman and fable, Barker makes magic with both her language and her subject. Janet, the protagonist, is born in Edinburgh during WW II. Her inattentive, eccentric parents, after a course of alternately baiting and tolerating their daughter, finally leave her to her own devices--serious mischief, books and the isolation of a misunderstood intellectual adolescent--while they increase their fold by four more offspring. By then the family has moved to a sprawling old castle in the lonely north of Scotland called Auchnasaugh (``the field of sighing''). Darker intimations of mortality mix with childhood escapades as Barker's quick, urbane narration and high-flown, wicked humor convey as well the passions and pain of her protagonist. The fate awaiting Janet in the final pages, though clearly foretold in the preface, comes with a shock, as this entrancing first novel, winner of Britain's David Higham Prize, casts a spell that will make readers willingly forget what they know.
