From the Dust Returned
A Family Remembrance
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4.2 • 9 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A landmark publishing event—a bestselling, award-winning master of American literature offers a long-anticipated new novel featuring one of his most beloved creations, the Elliott family
A lifelong labor of love 55 years in the making, From the Dust Returned is the long awaited full-length tale featuring Ray Bradbury’s popular Elliotts: a novel comprised of six previously published and other never-before-seen stories about an outlandish, greathearted, and loving-spirited Halloween creature clan and their “abnormal” (he can see his reflection in the mirror!) adopted son Timothy.
Meet Cecy, “the one who dreams,” a young girl who experiences the world only through the travels of her mind; Uncle Einar, a fun-loving vampire who loses his ability to fly; and Tom, a farm boy whom Cecy “meets” and falls in love with during one of her spirit-borne journeys.
Touching, wistful, and graced with his trademark wit, From the Dust Returned embodies the powerful vision and imagination of one of the world’s great literary icons, Ray Bradbury.
A great read for spooky-season nightsA perfect addition to any Halloween reading list
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
If there's a fountain of youth, Bradbury has found it. In the 1940s, at the start of his extraordinary writing career, Bradbury produced a series of popular fantasy short stories about the Elliot family, an assortment of vampires and other odd creatures of various degrees of humanity living in a Victorian castle in the golden Indiana of his youth. More than half a century later, he has fashioned from these stories a novel, funny, beautiful, sad and wise, to rank with his finest work. Full of wide-eyed wonder and dazzling imagery, the stories retain as an integrated whole all their original freshness and charm. The plot is simplicity itself: the vampires and their weird kin gather for a homecoming and share memories. Among them are Timothy, a foundling, whose pet spider is named Arach (originally Spid), and Cecy, immobile in bed but able to enter the minds of others and control their actions. Once, Cecy got a young woman to treat an unwanted but worthy suitor more politely than she would have otherwise: "Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist's wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: 'Thank you.' " Einar, a winged man, acts as a kite for children, writing "a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!" Most memorable of a remarkable cast are A Thousand Times Great Grand-M re, who had been "a pharaoh's daughter dressed in spider linens," and her husband, Grand-P re, who after four thousand years still has ideas. "At your age!" she snaps. This book will shame the cynics and delight the true believers who never lost faith in their beloved author. FYI:Last fall Bradbury received the National Book Foundation's 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Customer Reviews
Haunting
An excellent modern day fantasy about an ancient family living in Illinois. The plot is woven with wonderful tapestries and ideas that Ray had been working on since the 1940s. Amazing!