Astonishing Splashes of Colour - Hardcover

Morrall, Clare

3.65

2,130 ratings by Goodreads

9780060734459: Astonishing Splashes of Colour

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060734450 ISBN 13: 9780060734459

Publisher: Harper, 2005

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Booker finalist Astonishing Splashes of Colour takes its title from J. M. Barrie's description of Peter Pan's Neverland. It follows the life of Kitty, a woman who, in a sense, has never grown up. She lives an improvised life reviewing children's books, visiting her husband who lives in the apartment next door, and fostering a growing obsession to replace her lost child.

Kitty's strong, appealing personality drives this novel, as she relates her story in a jumbled state of consciousness. Her moods swing dramatically from high to low and are illuminated by an unusual ability to interpret people and emotions through colour. Kitty struggles to uncover the secrets of her childhood from her father and brothers, but their revelations threaten to overwhelm her tenuous hold on reality, leaving the reader feeling both sympathetic and horrified with her impetuous journey into madness. Skillful, unsentimental, fresh, and original, this is a sparkling debut by a writer of exceptional talent.

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From the Publisher:

2003 Man Booker Prize Shortlist Selection

From the Inside Flap:

?When is the right time to tell someone they?re not who they think they are?? Caught in an over-vivid world as a result of synaesthesia (a condition in which emotions are seen as colours), Kitty Wellington is tipped off-centre by the loss of a child. And as children all around become emblems of hope and longing and grief, she?s made shockingly aware of the real reasons for her pervasive sense of her own ?non-existence.?

What mystery at the heart of Kitty?s family makes her four older brothers so vague about her mother?s life? And why does her artist father splash paint on canvas rather than answer his daughter?s questions? On the edges of her dreams, Kitty glimpses the kaleidoscope hippie van that took her sister Dinah away and wonders how this event may link to the dim corridors of her own childhood, a childhood in which she had no tangible sense of her mother.

This compelling novel is threaded through with a dark humour and resonates with universal truths as it tells of identity struggles in a large family, the sadness of lost children, the approach of breakdown and desperation ? and the optimism of an eccentric, loving marriage. Skilful, unsentimental, fresh, and original, Astonishing Splashes of Colour is a sparkling debut by a writer of exceptional talent.

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