Crusoe's Daughter
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of Old Filth. "[A] wonderfully old-fashioned novel . . . This post-Victorian charmer is an engrossing delight" (People).
In 1904, six-year-old Polly Flint is sent by her sea captain father to live with her aunts in a house by the sea on England's northeast coast. Orphaned shortly thereafter, Polly will spend the next eighty years stranded in this quiet corner of the world as the twentieth century rages in the background. Through it all, Polly returns again and again to the story of Robinson Crusoe, who, marooned like her, fends off the madness of isolation with imagination.
In the Guardian's series on writers and readers' favorite comfort books, associate editor Claire Armitstead said of Crusoe's Daughter, "This is the most bookish of books . . . Every time I return to it, I am comforted by its refusal to conform, its wonderful, boisterous bolshiness, and the intelligence with which it demonstrates that we are what we read."
"Witty, subversive, moving." —The Times (London)
"[A] richly textured novel . . . much occurs on the emotional landscape. We know Polly intimately, and she haunts our imaginations as surely as Crusoe haunts hers . . . a thought-provoking book." —Library Journal
"[The] most seductively entertaining of British novelists." —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Polly Flint, the central figure in this civilized English novel, is six years old as it opens in 1904, an old woman at its end, in 1985her mind and imagination filled with the presence of her heroic exemplar, Robinson Crusoe. Installed by her seafaring father in a big yellow house in Yorkshire under the care of two pious aunts, she spends her life in and near that spot. Once she loved a young poet who died in the Great War; later there was a German-Jewish refugee who placed his daughters in Polly's care before he died. Events occur undramatically, related with equal weight no matter what their relative significance. Companionable though it is, the novel lacks urgency; even when Polly speaks directly with Crusoe, they exchange tepid, truistic remarks about the nature of memory and fiction, memoir and imagination. Then he is gone and the tale ends as quietly as it began. Gardam's award-winning books include God on the Rocks and The Pangs of Love.
