Florence and Giles

ISBN-13: 9780007315048 / Angielski / Miękka / 2011 / 240 str.

John Harding

Opis

1891. In a remote and crumbling New England mansion, 12-year-old orphan Florence is neglected by her guardian uncle and banned from reading. Left to her own devices she devours books in secret and talks to herself - and narrates this, her story - in a unique language of her own invention.

Recenzje

'Real atmosphere is increasingly rare in novels and here it is in spades...A darkly glamorous tour de force.'
Wendy Holden, DAILY MAIL

'Harding rings enough ingenious changes on James's study of perversity to produce his own full-blown Gothic horror tale. The climax of their struggle... is genuinely exciting and shocking.' THE INDEPENDENT

'Florence and Giles is an elegant literary exercise worked out with the strictness of a fugue: imagine Henry James's The Turn of the Screw reworked by Edgar Allan Poe...Nothing prepares you for the chillingly ruthless but inevitable finale.' THE TIMES

'A tight gothic thriller... The climax becomes unbearably tense. Florence feels the horror of her situation "cheese-grating" her soul, which is just how Harding leaves the reader feeling at the end of this creepily suggestive story.' FINANACIAL TIMES

'Harding's creepy, ingenious tale slyly wrongfoots the reader, and its deliciously sinister conclusion is the stuff of troubled nights.' THE LADY

'Brilliantly creepy' DAILY MIRROR

'An intriguing read' GRAZIA

'A good, clever, modern take on old-style American gothic; a creepy haunted house tale in which the living are just as eerie as any real or imagined ghouls.' NEW ZEALAND HERALD

'a scarily good story, in an arrestingly unusual narrative voice.' THE OXFORD TIMES

O autorze

John Harding is one of Britain's most versatile contemporary novelists. He is the author of five novels. Born in a small village in the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire, he was educated at the village school and read English at St Catherine's College, Oxford. His latest novel, The Girl Who Couldn't Read (2014) is a sequel to Florence and Giles that can be read as a standalone novel by those who haven't read the earlier book.