Oystercatchers: A Novel - Hardcover

Fletcher, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393060039 ISBN 13: 9780393060034

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Synopsis

A lyrical novel about the bond between two sisters, by the author of Eve Green, recipient of the Whitbread Award.

Sixteen-year-old Amy lies in a coma. Her elder sister, Moira, sits beside her in the evenings and tells this story seeking forgiveness and retribution. She tells of her own life―her secrets, her shameful actions, and her link to the accident that has brought her sister to this bed.

An only child until the age of eleven, Moira perceived the arrival of Amy as a betrayal. Sent away to a boarding school, she became untrusting, inward, lonely. Even after marriage, she continued to doubt herself and that anyone could love her and be faithful. It is only Amy's accident that brings her back to her family, closer to her husband, and closer to understanding the implications of her own dark nature.

Susan Fletcher lyrically probes the pulls of envy, loneliness, and love―craving it, fearing it, and ultimately recognizing it as the greatest force of all.

About this title

About the Author:

Susan Fletcher is the author of Eve Green, which won the Whitbread Award for First Novel, Oystercatchers, and The Highland Witch. She lives in the United Kingdom.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Sixteen-year-old Amy has lain in a hospital bed for four years, comatose as the result of a head injury. Countless times her sister, Moira, older by 11 years, has sat by the bedside, telling her sister the story of her life. Telling? Confessing is more like it, for Moira, who blames herself for the accident, has always resented her younger sister, blaming her for usurping her place in the family: a scholarship student, Moira was sent off to a girls' school just months before Amy's birth. And, though a brilliant student, she was desperately unhappy at school: a tall, silent, slender girl with glasses, big feet, and big hands, she was unpopular, laughed at, called chicken tits, odd-looking, and worse. Moira tells her often bleak story in a voice that fluctuates between first and third person, making it at once intimate and removed, capturing the adolescent she was and the scientist she would become. Fletcher is a novelist with the soul of a poet, and Oystercatchers is exquisitely written and unafraid of risk: its pace is unhurried, and its protagonist, Moira, is often unlikable, but any reader who cares for gorgeous writing, richly realized setting, and character will find much here to treasure. Cart, Michael

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0393060039
• ISBN 13: 9780393060034
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336