Last Things
From the author of Weather, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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'Unexpectedly funny' - New York Times
'Full of imagination, humour and invention ... A glorious debut' - Irish Times
'Mesmerising ... She writes with a heartbreaking clarity ... and is dexterously able to evoke emotional extremity through pitch-perfect narrative compression' - The Times
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THE EXQUISITE DEBUT NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF WEATHER, SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020
To eight-year-old Grace Davitt, her mother, Anna, is a puzzling yet wonderful mystery. This is a woman who has seen a sea serpent in the lake, who paints a timeline of the universe on the sewing-room wall, and who teaches her daughter a secret language which only they can speak.
For Grace's father, however, the only truth is science, and increasingly he finds himself shut out by Anna as she draws Grace deeper and deeper into a strange world of myth and obsession.
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Selected as a Book of the Year in Guardian, Telegraph, Observer, Irish Times and New York Times
'The charisma and damage of madness lend a desperate glamour' - Elle
'A gem of a book' - Tatler
'Brilliantly captures the confusion of childhood' - Red
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With an ornithologist mother who speaks five languages (including Pig Latin), who was also possibly a CIA spy, a cryptozoologist or just your average maniacal collector of eccentric facts, young Grace Davitt's coming-of-age story is a bizarre kind of linguistic ontological experiment. Her father is "Mr. Science," obsessed with physical data and categorical details to the point of abstraction. Grace's world is one that readers are unlikely ever to have encountered before; riding the line between whimsical and sinister, she is a unique protagonist. Oddly passive in the way that children considered unconventionally brilliant are sometimes deemed by observers, Grace takes control of her destiny, in the wake of her mother's unexplained disappearance, by reinventing language and metaphorizing her life. She continues with the rich and wacky legacy her mother has left her: home schooling; a "secret language" named Annic in which the alphabet's first 13 letters mirror the second 13, and the "cosmic calendar" in which one billion years of real time can be condensed into 24 days. Nothing in this narrative is standard fare: a bizarre mother-daughter road trip, a boy-genius babysitter, the Loch Ness monster and a recurrent theme of psychological anthropomorphism are among the plot elements. In spite of Grace's sometimes unlovable behavior, she is an engaging character. When she bullies a blind girl, Offil's point is clear; Grace's esoteric knowledge and novel socialization inform but cannot finally change the fact that she is a young girl on shaky ground. On the cusp of a definitively weird adolescence, she's brimming with the implosive, even brutal, energy of that impending transformation. Offill's debut is a rare feat of remarkable constraint and nearly miraculous construction of a most unique family.
