Nelly's Version (British Literature) - Softcover

Figes, Eva; Eva, Figes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564783138 ISBN 13: 9781564783134

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002

Synopsis

In acclaimed author Eva Figes' inventive reshaping of the pop psychological thriller, her fifth novel opens as Nelly Dean, a middle-aged woman suffering from amnesia, checks into a small-town hotel with a suitcase full of cash and no idea where it - or she - came from. Distrustful of everyone from the waiter who serves her lunch to a store clerk who claims to know her from grade school, Nelly fears she is part of a conspiracy, although she is strangely indifferent to the clues that might explain her puzzling circumstances. Part dark comedy, part mystery novel, Nelly's Version offers an unsettling journey into the mind of a witty, intelligent woman stuck in a pastless present.

About this title

About the Author:

Eva Figes is the author of several novels, including The Seven Ages, Ghosts, and The Tenancy. Her nonfiction includes Patriarchal Attitudes, Little Eden: A Child at War, and Sex and Subterfuge.

From Publishers Weekly:

A woman gloats over the false name she inscribes in the hotel register as she checks into the Black Swan. The appellation is "Nelly Dean." Intriguingly, this is the name of the housekeeper in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights , so the reader can expect uncanny happenings and is not disappointed. The problem with "Nelly" is that she has no recollection of who she really is or how she got to this place, though she recounts with brilliantly convincing lucidity the events of each day of her sojourn. She feels happy at the Black Swan, yet each of her forays into the village is followed by some crime: an old woman is brutally beaten; a house is torched; a bank is robbed. Nelly seems blissfully unconcerned. Visitors arrive. One claims to be her son; a portly man tries, impotently, to make love to her. Although she recognizes no one, Nelly is haunted by a sense of deja vu (such as reading bits of her own life in a library book). Mirrors disconcert her; the elderly, puffy-faced woman who glares from inside the wardrobe door, and again from the hairdresser's mirror, must be, she feels, somebody else. Finally, she shrouds her looking glass with an old robe. A British import, this is a pleasingly eerie study in amnesiac derangement by the author of The Seven Ages.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1564783138
• ISBN 13: 9781564783134
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 218
• Illustrator: Faludi Susan