The Lost Father - Hardcover

Marina Walker is a novelist, historian and critic. Her fiction includes Indigo, The Lost Father (awarded a Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), the collection of stories, Mermaids in the Basement and most recently The Leto Bundle. Her historical quests into areas of myth and symbolism - Alone of All Her Sex, Joan of Arc, Monuments and Maidens, and No go the Bogeyman - led her into the exploration of fairy tales. She is the editor of Wonder Tales, a collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries and the author of a study of the fairy tale, From the Beast to the Blonde. In 1994 she gave the Reith Lectures on BBC Radio, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time.

Shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize, this epic by the British author of In the Dark Wood and The Skating Party has all the ingredients for successful sales here. This multi-generational saga set in the south of Italy portrays a family altered irrevocably by its own myths. A fateful duel, a powerful patriarch and the binding affection among women are all presented in an ornate narrative that flows with rich descriptions. Anna, the narrator, tries to reconstruct the circumstances of her mother's life in New York and Italy, and the mysterious events surrounding the death of her grandfather, Davide Pittagora. Her daily routine in London, where she works in a small museum, contrasts with her imaginative re-creation of her family's violent history in a land torn by poverty and facism. Warner's style evokes the visual imagery of Bertolucci's films, while the heaviness of some of the emotion and drama seems more operatic. Readers should find this narrative both satisfying and nourishing, since its essential intelligence and quality of writing transcend the conventional family saga genre.
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