Lanny: Author of the Number One Sunday Times Bestseller SHY - Hardcover

Porter, Max

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571340288 ISBN 13: 9780571340286

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2019

Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2019
LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE 2019
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2019

Not far from London, there is a village.

This village belongs to the people who live in it and to those who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England's mysterious past and its confounding present.

It belongs to Mad Pete, the grizzled artist. To ancient Peggy, gossiping at her gate. To families dead for generations, and to those who have only recently moved here.

But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort who has woken from his slumber in the woods. Dead Papa Toothwort, who is listening to them all.

Chimerical, audacious, strange and wonderful - a song to difference and imagination, to friendship, youth and love, Lanny is the globally anticipated new novel from Max Porter.

About this title

Review:

The writing is stunning and deeply affecting. The plot thunders along. This is a book that resolutely refuses to be categorised but to get somewhere close, think: Under Milk Wood meets Broadchurch. -- Nathan Filer

It's hard to express how much I loved Lanny. Books this good don't come along very often. It's a novel like no other, an exhilarating, disquieting, joyous read. It will reach into your chest and take hold of your heart. It's a novel to press into the hands of everyone you know and say, read this. -- Maggie O'Farrell

Max Porter writes like no one else and it is impossible not to be swept along and astounded. Lanny is a wonder. -- Daisy Johnson

It takes a special kind of genius to create something which is both so strange and yet so compulsive. -- Mark Haddon

It shouldn't be possible for a book to be simultaneously heart-stopping, heart-shaking and pulse-racing, but that is only one of the extraordinary feats Max Porter pulls off in this astonishing novel. -- Kamila Shamsie

In Lanny Max Porter has expanded on his innovative hybrid mode while remaining faithful to our species-wide tradition of storytelling through myth, magic, and parable, but also through the harrowing minutiae of being alive in the trying hours of a small town ruptured by loss. The result is a powerful yet tender reclamation of the imagination, love, and artmaking-all of it a brilliant defense of the outsider's tenuous foothold in society. -- Ocean Vuong

'Porter has an extraordinary ability to get under the reader's skin and his story of a peculiar child and the even more peculiar Dead Papa Toothwort is a thing of total joy, written in prose that thrums with rhythm and life.' -- Alex Preston, Observer 2019 previews

Porter is an enchanter with words; at no point does his story . . . seem improbable, even as its eerier and more inexplicable moments come faster, revealing the leafy darkness that threatens the unwary. Elegantly mysterious: a story worthy of an M.R. James or even a Henry James and a welcome return by an author eminently worth reading., Kirkus

'Shimmering with the uncanny, it's a remarkable feat of literary virtuosity.' -- Peter Kemp, Sunday Times

'A magically beguiling work, a triumph of artistic vision.' -- Doug Battersby, Financial Times

Book Description:

A devastating story told with the anarchy, the humour and the enchantment Max Porter's readers will recognise from Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0571340288
• ISBN 13: 9780571340286
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224