The Man who Loved Children - Softcover

Christina Stead

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190742900X ISBN 13: 9781907429002

Publisher: Capuchin Classics, 2010

Synopsis

Henrietta, privileged and sheltered, expected a smoothly comfortable society life in Washington when she married Sam Pollitt, a handsome self-made biologist. Ten years later, Henny is a skinny, screaming drudge with five children, a raging wreck of a woman driven by hate, horror, passion or contempt. But Sam, whose impractical idealism has brought his family to near-ruin, is unchanged: still at sea in all adult affairs, an absurd hypocritical buffoon but a genius with children ... except Louie, his eldest daughter, an ugly brilliant adolescent who is forced to take a drastic, final step to save herself and the children from lasting tragedy. The Man Who Loved Children is an astonishing account of the decline of an American bourgeois family. Intimate, accurate and savagely funny, it is also unforgettably moving.

About this title

Review:

She could transmute personal experience into something of both social and psychological significance ... She was one of the great originals --The Times

From the Back Cover:

Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous events and characters. Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside in--visitors, and particularly not relatives--for they have to see something pretty humdrum, even if, as in this case, the fecklessness them complain of is extreme.

About this edition

• Publisher: Capuchin Classics
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 190742900X
• ISBN 13: 9781907429002
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512