The Red House - Softcover

Haddon, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224096419 ISBN 13: 9780224096416

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Every bit as charmingly idiosyncratic as his brilliant The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" (Henry Sutton Daily Mirror)

"A hugely enjoyable, sympathetic novel...a tremendous pleasure...we have been absorbed, entertained and moved" (Kate Kellaway Observer)

"Mark Haddon is terrifyingly talented... The Red House is thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable entertainment" (Angus Clarke The Times)

"Shockingly well-observed, gut-wrenchingly familiar and even heartbreaking at times" (Stylist)

"A masterly evocation of two dysfunctional, yet outwardly respectable families" (Jane Clinton Sunday Express)

Book Description:

From the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time comes a novel about families and secrets - now re-jacketed with a stunning new cover look

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0224096419
• ISBN 13: 9780224096416
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272