The Children's Home - Softcover

Lambert, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 191070900X ISBN 13: 9781910709009

Publisher: Aardvark Bureau, 2016

Synopsis

‘This disquieting novel is surely one of the year’s most bizarre stories...' The New York Times

A beguiling and disarming novel about a mysterious group of children who appear to a disfigured recluse and his country doctor.

Morgan Fletcher, the disfigured heir to a fortune of mysterious origins, lives on a sprawling estate, cut off from a threatening world. One day, his housekeeper, Engel, discovers a baby left on the doorstep. Soon more children arrive, among them stern, watchful David. With the help of Engel and town physician Doctor Crane, Morgan takes the children in, allowing them to explore the mansion ... and to begin to uncover the strange and disturbing secrets it holds.

Cloaked in eerie atmosphere, this distorted fairy tale and the unsettling questions it raises will stay with the reader long after the final page.

Reviews

‘The Children’s Home is a not-nice sort of fairy tale, where the magic doesn’t sparkle prettily but boils and oozes, where the Prince has a face of tatters, where the children take grown-up revenge on their monsters. It is also, somehow, a searching, empathetic narrative about forgiveness.’ Owen King, author of Double Feature: A Novel

‘ ...one book that I shall re-read and re-read again.’ Postcard Reviews

‘Charles Lambert’s novel is entirely original ... highly compelling and invigorating writing.’ Lonesome Reader

‘This disquieting novel is surely one of the year’s most bizarre stories... Mr. Lambert’s subtle prose enhances the novel’s creepiness, as does his refusal to fully resolve or explain its many mysteries.’ The New York Times

‘Charles Lambert has crafted an exquisitely strange and deliciously dark offering ...  the narrative itself will haunt his readers well beyond the margins of its pages.’ High Voltage Magazine

‘The Children’s Home is a haunting Gothic in the vein of Shirley Jackson, steeped with the mystery and imagination of Neil Gaiman’s fairy tales. Lambert’s prose is beautiful and his tale is mesmerizing.’ Cementery Dance Online

‘A thoroughly original entry into the tradition of ghost stories, eschewing convention. ... Compulsively readable, a one-of-a-kind literary horror story.’ Kirkus

‘The Children’s Home is the best kind of ghost story – one that scares, one that surprises ... and one that you simply can’t stop reading.’ The Maine Edge

‘... definitely recommend this if you’re in the mood for something a little creepy.’ Bored to Death Book Club

‘The Children’s Home may well be the most surprising, thought provoking and also baffling book I’ve ever read.’ Bailieborough Library Reading Group

‘Lambert is a brilliant writer, and his absorbing new novel, The Children’s Home , is the best literary fiction I have read in some time.’ Seattle Book Mama

‘The Children’s Home is a powerful construction of creeping dread which skilfully keeps the reader off-balance at every turn.’ The Star

‘There is really nothing at all in this story that isn’t strange and that’s what I ended up loving about it.’ In a Good Book Room

‘A disturbing and thought-provoking novel’ Annethology

‘Mysterious and weird and just a great read!’ Rebecca Book Review

‘Charles Lambert could one day attain classic status.’ Maggie Gee

‘Beautifully written and crafted, and more compelling than many thrillers’ Daily Mail

‘A beautiful and uncanny novel by a writer who never ceases to surprise.’ Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

‘This genre-bending debut is by turns dread-inducing and heartwarming, a masterful exploration of whether innocence can truly sprout from ignorance....a magical, mesmerizing tale about the courage it takes to confront the unknown.’ Booklist, STARRED review

‘Charles Lambert is a seriously good writer’ Beryl Bainbridge

About this title

About the Author

Charles Lambert is the author of several novels, short stories, and the memoir With a Zero at its Heart, which was voted one of The Guardian readers’ Ten Best Books of the Year in 2014. In 2007, he won an O. Henry Award for his short story The Scent of Cinnamon. His first novel, Little Monsters, was longlisted for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Born in England, Charles Lambert has lived in central Italy since 1980.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The children began to arrive soon after Engel came to the house. It was Engel who found the first one, an infant girl, in a basket, with a bundle of neatly folded, freshly washed clothes. The basket had been left on the steps leading up from the kitchen into the garden. Whoever had put it there must have known the way the house worked, because days might have passed before any of the other doors were opened; left anywhere else, the child would probably have died. As it was, no more than an hour or two had gone by but already the creature was blue with cold. Engel picked her up and held her, the small soft body pressed to her bosom, the small wrinkled face in the warm crook of her neck, for she didn’t know how long; a living daylight was how she described it to Morgan when she brought the baby up to him in his study. Looking across from his reading with amusement, Morgan explained that the living daylights were always plural and that they were supposed to be the part of the human soul most susceptible to fear. She nodded, fervently, that’s exactly right, it just goes on and on. That’s exactly how it was, she said, with the child’s small heart barely beating and the breath like a short hot knife blade on the skin of Engel’s neck. Engel lifted the baby away from her body and held her out to Morgan, who shook his head. 11 Charles Lambert She said they should tell someone perhaps, someone would know what to do with her, but Morgan disagreed. Left to himself he might have been tempted, what use did he have for a child, after all? But he could hear that Engel’s heart wasn’t in it. Just look at you both, he said. What could be better than this? Don’t you know how to deal with her as well as anyone? Let her stay here with us, where she will be clothed and fed, and kept out of this wicked weather. At least for a while. Perhaps, he thought, the child’s presence would encourage Engel not to go. He held her later, when she’d been given milk and changed into fresh clothes from the bundle she’d arrived with; decent hand-sewn clothes, laundered and ironed, made of white cotton. He stroked the soft hair from the fine blue veins of her forehead, the first child he’d ever taken in his arms, and examined his feelings to see if they were altered in any way. He wanted to see if this child would change him; more than anything he wanted that. But what he felt seemed familiar to him; he had felt it before with small animals, kittens, a hamster he’d once been given, the little stagger of a newborn lamb; even with plants, those plants that flowered and had scent, that had touched his heart for a moment before they died. It will take time, he said to himself, only slightly disappointed. Miracles will take time. At least, in the meantime, the child might begin to love him. They called her Moira, which Morgan told Engel meant fate. At which information, Engel sniffed. Engel watched the two of them, that morning, standing in the centre of the kitchen with a bowl of cream in her hand, which she was going to beat and pour on bread pudding for lunch. No waste was allowed in Engel’s world; even week- 12 The Children’s Home old bread had its uses. The cream, the colour of old lace, came from one of the black-and-white cows that Morgan could see from his room at the top of the house, herds of cows grazing beyond the wall that encircled his own land, as far as the city itself, where his sister ran the factory. Other children arrived soon after that, as though Morgan had earned them by taking the first one in. Some were abandoned, as Moira had been, left on the kitchen step, which was now checked hourly; others, he suspected, were given to Engel at the door, by whom, he didn’t know. These were the children who arrived empty-handed. By the end of the third month of Moira’s presence in the house, there were six or seven, he wasn’t sure exactly, of varying ages. Moira remained the youngest. According to Engel, who seemed to know, she couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old when she was left. The oldest among them was a fair-haired boy who walked into the house one day with a cardboard tag―the kind used for parcels―attached to his wrist, on which the name David had been written in a childish hand. Taken immediately to Morgan, he stood up like a little soldier before his desk, stared straight ahead, and announced, in a solemn yet singsong voice, that he was five years old and had no mother or father and would behave well if he was treated well. The ages of the others ranged between these two, Moira and David, whom Morgan regarded as the most precious, perhaps because they were the most easily distinguished; Moira, the first and youngest, and David, with his tag, the eldest. 13

About this edition

• Publisher: Aardvark Bureau
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 191070900X
• ISBN 13: 9781910709009
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 206