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To 8-year-old Grace Davitt, her mother is a puzzling yet wonderful mystery. This is a woman who has seen a sea serpent in the lake, who paints a timeline of the universe (in which "one billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar") on the sewing-room wall, and who teaches her daughter a secret language which only they can speak. To the reader, however, it soon becomes clear that Anna Davitt is more than just eccentric. As her obsessions grow, her relationship with Grace's father, Robert, gradually deteriorates until at last the family breaks apart and Grace is left alone with her unstable mother.
Writing an adult novel from a young child's point of view is a tricky business, but Jenny Offill pulls it off without breaking a sweat. God is in the details here, and these are spot-on, from young Grace's fascination with the blind girl who lives in the neighborhood to her speculations about the prior tenant of the uninhabited dog house in the backyard. Grace inhabits that peculiar geography of childhood where all things are reasonable, from the descriptions of gazelle-boys in her Encyclopedia of the Unexplained to her mother's mercurial mood shifts. What makes Anna Davitt's spiral into madness so unnerving is the fact that to her daughter this is business as usual. Last Things has been compared to that other classic of unconventional childhood, Housekeeping; certainly Offill's debut is richly deserving of the company it keeps. --Alix Wilber
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. _______________'Unexpectedly funny' - New York Times'Full of imagination, humour and invention . A glorious debut' - Irish Times'Mesmerising . She writes with a heartbreaking clarity . and is dexterously able to evoke emotional extremity through pitch-perfect narrative compression' - The Times_______________THE EXQUISITE DEBUT NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF WEATHER, SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020To eight-year-old Grace Davitt, her mother, Anna, is a puzzling yet wonderful mystery. This is a woman who has seen a sea serpent in the lake, who paints a timeline of the universe on the sewing-room wall, and who teaches her daughter a secret language which only they can speak.For Grace's father, however, the only truth is science, and increasingly he finds himself shut out by Anna as she draws Grace deeper and deeper into a strange world of myth and obsession._______________Selected as a Book of the Year in Guardian, Telegraph, Observer, Irish Times and New York Times'The charisma and damage of madness lend a desperate glamour' - Elle'A gem of a book' - Tatler'Brilliantly captures the confusion of childhood' - Red Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781408879719
Book Description paperback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9781408879719
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Book Description Condition: New. 2012. New edition. Paperback. Num Pages: 224 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 199 x 137 x 19. Weight in Grams: 160. . . . . . Seller Inventory # V9781408879719
Book Description Condition: New. 2012. New edition. Paperback. Num Pages: 224 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 199 x 137 x 19. Weight in Grams: 160. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland. Seller Inventory # V9781408879719