Black Baby: A Novel - Hardcover

Boylan, Clare

3.31

49 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385261012 ISBN 13: 9780385261012

Publisher: Doubleday, 1989

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

This story is concerned with what happens when dreams come true too literally and too late, concentrating on Alice who, as a child regularly sent money to the missions to "buy" a black baby. Fifty years later she meets Dinah, a strange black woman and is forced to rethink cherished preconceptions and old values. Clare Boylan has also written "Holy Pictures" and "Last Resorts".

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

A touching story of companionship from one of the unsung heroes of contemporary Irish literature, Black Baby is a complex novel that traces the tragic and comic effects of human loneliness. Alice is an elderly spinster whose Christmas speech to her nephews ends with "I am all alone in the world. I have neither chick nor child" as she passes year by predictable year in the same Dublin house she was born in. One stormy night, Alice opens her door to Dinah, a spirited black woman whom Alice becomes convinced is the black baby she "adopted" from the missionaries of Africa when she was a child. This new-found daughter breathes warmth and energy into Alice's barren existence, and a friendship ensues that becomes the beloved focus of a lonely woman's life. Clare Boylan has written a moving novel that is punctuated with laugh-out-loud scenes of absurdity reminiscent of fellow Irishman Flann O'Brien: "...it was not Mrs Willoughby's hand which had struck the table, but her head. The vigilant glass eyes of the fox stared up from the bread plate, its dead paws flung out in alarm beside the dead head of its owner." Magical and absorbing, this book is a wonder to read. --Shannon Bingham

Review:

Sexual generosity triumphs over terrified frigidity, warmth dries out cold, renewal stamps out decay... This is a novelist who alters one's ways of seeing (SUNDAY TIMES)

Splendidly original and richly comic... the writing is a joy (IRISH TIMES)

The book I have read with the greatest pleasure, amusement and deep sympathy (Molly Keane, SUNDAY TIMES)

Humorous and inventive... it spills over with affections for strangeness and wayward warmth (THE TIMES)

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.