Published by Jonathan Cape, part of Vintage Publishing
Format: Hardback
£16.99
Author:
Mark Haddon
Format: Hardback
EAN: 9780224096409
£16.99
Available for dispatch within 1-2 working days
EAN: 9780224096409
Published: 10 May 2012
Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.
After his mother's death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister, inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks.
But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviours. And watching over all of them from high on the dark hill, Karen, Angela's stillborn daughter.
The Red House is about the extraordinariness of the ordinary, weaving the words and thoughts of the eight characters together with those fainter, stranger voices - of books and letters and music, of the dead who once inhabited these rooms, of the ageing house itself and the landscape in which it sits.
Once again Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and A Spot of Bother, has written a novel that is funny, poignant and deeply insightful about human lives.
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A beautiful object that will grace any holiday home's unfixably wobbly bedside table. The cover feels like a cracked china plate, decorated with a clever re-working of the willow-pattern; like the contents, it is subtle and clever. Haddon writes superb books for children, teenagers and grown-ups, and gets every voice in this one dead right. He is also a master craftsman, so this complicated narrative moves with the speed and certainty of released, unhappy holidaymakers hitting the homeward road. So shove this in your holidaying bag. You may have made a mistake with the booking, but you won't with the book
- Independent
Mark Haddon is terrifyingly talented... The Red House is thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable entertainment
- The Times
A hugely enjoyable, sympathetic novel...a tremendous pleasure...we have been absorbed, entertained and moved
- Observer
Rather like with Alan Ayckbourn's plays, what makes The Red House engaging is the quality of the writing. From the first page in which the train carrying Dominic and Angela's family 'unzips the fields', there is a vigor to Haddon's prose which carries you along. I read it twice, both times with enjoyment
- Independent on Sunday
With writing as elegant and truthful as this, readers will wish to keep their copies close at hand to savour again
- Daily Mail
Haddon achieves a remarkable mélange of streams of consciousness, snatches of books, music, TV, private thoughts, lists, letters, all intertwined with sharply observed vignettes of everyday banality, soaring flights of description
- Guardian
A masterly evocation of two dysfunctional, yet outwardly respectable families
- Sunday Express
Rather like with Alan Ayckbourn's plays, what makes The Red House engaging is the quality of the writing. From the first page in which the train carrying Dominic and Angela's family 'unzips the fields', there is a vigor to Haddon's prose which carries you along. I read it twice, both times with enjoyment
- Independent on Sunday
First and foremost an easy read. But it’s not just that, it’s also shockingly well-observed, gut-wrenchingly familiar and even heartbreaking at times
- Stylist
The Red House – an adult novel set in Wales about a tortured family holiday, narrated equally the voices of children and adults - plays to all his strengths
- Vanity Fair
In this touching tale, Haddon skillfully captures the preoccupation of each generation as he charts the currents that pull families together and apart
- Mail on Sunday
Haddon can marry extraordinary perception with uncluttered language… He also burrows into the minds of his protagonists with astute precision
- Times Literary Supplement
Mark Haddon proved in his recent novel The Red House, you can make every character in a large cast, even those with one or two lines, feel substantial
- Herald
Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. His bestselling novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, was published simultaneously by Jonathan Cape and David Fickling in 2003. It won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award. His poetry collection, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, was published by Picador in 2005, and his last novel, The Red House, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2012. He lives in Oxford.
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