Grasshopper - Hardcover

Vine, Barbara

3.73

3,212 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670891746 ISBN 13: 9780670891740

Publisher: Viking, 2000

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Barbara Vine's 10th novel, her first since the bestselling and highly acclaimed THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER'S BOY, is about a group of young people who live in a top-floor flat and literally walk the rooftops of Maida Vale. It's narrated by Clodagh, nineteen when the story takes place and already damaged by the death of her boyfriend. When the group gets involved with a family that's on the run from the law, it looks like history is going to repeat itself. An enthralling, chilling novel - a kind of brilliant mirror-image of Vine's acclaimed London Underground novel KING SOLOMON'S CARPET. "She goes for the imagination as a lesser writer would go for the jugular" - Literary Review

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Review:

Clodagh is supposed to feel guilty and is being punished more than anyone quite realises; it was the love of high places that led her to climb pylons and got her best friend killed--it is claustrophobia which is driving her to the edge in the basement London flat to which she has been exiled. Barbara Vine's brilliantly atmospheric new thriller Grasshopper is the tale of Clodagh's recovery and liberation; it is also the tale of new mistakes, and their disastrous consequences. In the London of the late 1980s, Clodagh finds her own level--and it is way above the streets, with a roof-jaunting group of disaffected young people, each with a trauma of their own. For Swedish Liv, it is the nightmare of au-pairing; for Silver, it was abduction as a small boy; for the sinister young thug Jimmy, it was sexual abuse on a massive scale. When they graduate from merely clambering around to trying to do good, that is when the trouble starts... We all know where good intentions lead, after all. Vine is more good-natured than usual here--we know that the mature electrician Clodagh who tells the story came through OK, and that her voice is one we can trust, more or less... --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"Mesmerizing. . . . A teasing narrative of fatal obsession."--Orlando Sentinel "The Vine novels are sublime works of psychological suspense...Grasshopper is as skillful as anything this wonderful writer has done."--The Seattle Times"A typically elegant, and typically elegiac, turn from the woman with two award-winning names. And one superlative voice."--Fort Worth Star Telegram

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