Crusoe's Daughter - Softcover

Gardam, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609450698 ISBN 13: 9781609450694

Publisher: Europa Editions, 2012

Synopsis

In 1904, six-year-old Polly Flint is sent to live with her aunt’s in a house by the sea. Orphaned shortly thereafter, Polly will spend the next eighty years stranded in this quiet corner of the world as 20th century rages in the background. Throughout it all Polly returns again and again to the story of Robinson Crusoe, who, marooned like her, fends off the madness of isolation with imagination.

Like previous Gardam titles will skew to female readers and Anglophiles. An ideal choice for book clubs.

About this title

About the Author:

Jane Gardam's novels include, The Flight of the Maidens, a New York Times Notable Book. She won the prestigious Whitbread Award for The Hollow Land and The Queen of the Tambourine, while God on the Rocks was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Old Filth, was a finalist for the Orange Prize, The Man in the Wooden Hat was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Last Friends, was a finalist for the Folio Award. She lives in England near the sea.

From Publishers Weekly:

Polly Flint, the central figure in this civilized English novel, is six years old as it opens in 1904, an old woman at its end, in 1985her mind and imagination filled with the presence of her heroic exemplar, Robinson Crusoe. Installed by her seafaring father in a big yellow house in Yorkshire under the care of two pious aunts, she spends her life in and near that spot. Once she loved a young poet who died in the Great War; later there was a German-Jewish refugee who placed his daughters in Polly's care before he died. Events occur undramatically, related with equal weight no matter what their relative significance. Companionable though it is, the novel lacks urgency; even when Polly speaks directly with Crusoe, they exchange tepid, truistic remarks about the nature of memory and fiction, memoir and imagination. Then he is gone and the tale ends as quietly as it began. Gardam's award-winning books include God on the Rocks and The Pangs of Love.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1609450698
• ISBN 13: 9781609450694
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224