The Lost Father - Hardcover

Warner, Marina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671674552 ISBN 13: 9780671674557

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1989

Synopsis

The story of a family, bringing to life the forgotten heart of Italy, the Mezzogiorno, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism. This is the imaginary memoir of an Italian family, from 1909 to the 1930s, with a framework in the present day. The narrator is drawn into the passion and prejudice of her own invention, and we see how memory, like folk memory distorts and mythologizes. Marina Warner is best known for her non-fictional work - "The Dragon Empress", "Alone of All Her Sex - The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary", "Joan of Arc" and "Monuments and Maidens" (Winner of the 1986 Fawcett Prize).

About this title

Review:

"An idiosyncratic and haunting novel: lush, slow-paced, sensual, metaphorical and, at the same time, anxiously worrying over the demands of kinship and the trail of history... This is a cultural historian's novel and the scholarly curiosity that went into Marina Warner's fine books of female myths and iconography makes here for a devotedly careful recreation" (Hermione Lee Observer)

"Warner's language and pace astonish and reward. Her characters, male and female, elderly and children, strike again and again the unexpected true note, whether playing, grieving, lusting, skinning fowl for dinner or complaining about politics" (Marianne Wiggins Sunday Times)

"The Lost Father has all the pleasure of a literary crossword puzzle, combined with a brilliantly realised women's world... It is Warner's best novel so far" (Lorraine Fletcher Guardian)

"Marina Warner's fiction has a slow, dreamy quality that is at once pleasurable and slightly sinister... This is a moving book, and a very bookish one" (Lorna Sage Times Literary Supplement)

Book Description:

'An ambitious novel of rare imaginative power' - Independent

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0671674552
• ISBN 13: 9780671674557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1