The Red House
A Novel
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3.5 • 124 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From Mark Haddon, the bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, comes a dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family life.
Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister and her family to join his family for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Against the backdrop of a strange family gathering, Haddon skillfully weaves together the stories of eight very different people forced into close quarters. The Red House is a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly guarded secrets and illicit desires, painting a portrait of contemporary family life that is at once bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) sets his sights on the modern social novel with a seriously dysfunctional family. Radiologist Richard, newly remarried to Louisa, who has something of a "footballer's wife" about her, hosts his resentful sister Angela and her family at his vacation home in the English countryside for the week. Both Richard's new wife, and her cold-blooded 16-year-old daughter, Melissa, arouse the attentions of Angela's teenage children: son Alex, and daughter Daisy, whose sexual curiosity might lead her to trouble. Angela's uninterested husband, Dominic; their youngest son, Benjy; and the lurking ghost of their stillborn child round out the family. But most of all there's the universe of media from books and iPods to DVDs and video games that fortifies everyone's private world; intrudes upon a week of misadventures, grudges, and unearthed secrets; and illuminates Haddon's busy approach to fairly sedate material, a choice that unfortunately makes the payoffs seldom worth the pages of scattershot perspective. Characters are well-drawn (especially regarding the marital tensions lurking below facades of relative bliss), but what emerges is typical without being revelatory, familiar without becoming painfully human. The tiresomely quirky Haddon misses the epochal timbre that Jonathan Franzen hit with Freedom, and his constantly distracted novel is rarely more than a distraction itself.
Customer Reviews
Intresting
I thought that this book was great in the beginning but it slowly began to lose my interest near the end.
Hard to stick with
I found this book hard to stick with. The constant changes between voices and frequent segues to poetry or other quotations had me skipping ahead a lot.
Miserable
I buy and read 2-3 books a month and love most of them. I had to go back and write a review on this one in the hope of preventing someone else from wasting their money on it. It is horrific - a complete waste. Browse and buy elsewhere. Truly awful.