Prince Rupert's Teardrop

Glass, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906120153 ISBN 13: 9781906120153

Publisher: Two Ravens Press, 2007

Mary undresses and wades into the boating lake. She dives and opens her eyes. In the blur, she perceives the outline of a head - she reaches... A dead bird. But she will keep searching. Because Mary's mother, Meghranoush - a ninety-four year-old survivor of the genocide of Armenians by the Turkish army early in the twentieth century - has vanished. Mary is already known to the police: a serial telephoner, a reporter of wrongdoing, a nuisance. Her doctor talks of mental illness. But what has happened is not just inside her head. A trail of glass birds mocks her. A silver thimble shines at the riverbed - a thimble that belonged to her mother. A glassblower burns a body in a furnace and uses the ash to colour a vase. Rumours circulate of a monster stalking the women of Plymouth. Has her mother simply left - trying to escape the ghosts of genocide in her mind - or has she been abducted? It is left to this most unreliable and unpredictable of daughters to try to find her, in this moving, lyrical, and very powerful work.

Product Description:

Mary undresses and wades into the boating lake. She dives and opens her eyes. In the blur, she perceives the outline of a head - she reaches - a dead bird. But she will keep searching. Because Mary's mother, Meghranoush - a ninety-four year-old survivor of the genocide of Armenians by the Turkish army early in the twentieth century - has vanished.

Review:

A virtuoso stylist of the calibre of Rachel Cusk, Lisa Glass has created a powerful murder mystery, whose violent undercurrents flow from the bitter inheritance of the Armenian genocide. -- Stevie Davies

Lisa Glass writes with dazzling linguistic exuberance and a fearless imagination.
-- RN Morris

Prince Rupert's Teardrop digs into the macabre inside apparently mundane lives, and dissects it with relish, energy and compassion. -- Emma Darwin