THE RED HOUSE
Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.
After his mother's death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister, inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games and wet walks.
But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviours. And watching over all of them from high on the dark hill, Karen, Angela's stillborn daughter.
The Red House is about the extraordinariness of the ordinary, weaving the words and thoughts of the eight characters together with those fainter, stranger voices - of books and letters and music, of the dead who once inhabited these rooms, of the ageing house itself and the landscape in which it sits.
Once again Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and A Spot of Bother has written a novel that is funny, poignant and deeply insightful about human lives.
Format 264 pages, Paperback, Very Good Condition
Published June 12, 2012 by Jonathan Cape
A SPOT OF BOTHER
George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely. Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.
At 61, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels and listening to a bit of light jazz. Then his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting re-married, to the deeply inappropriate Ray. Her family is not pleased as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has stranglers hands. Katie cant decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husbands ex-colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.
Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.
The way these damaged people fall apart and come together as a family is the true subject of Haddons disturbing yet amusing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.
Mark Haddons unforgettable follow-up to the internationally beloved bestseller THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME. Here the madness literally of family life proves rich comic fodder for Haddons crackling prose and bittersweet insights into misdirected love.
Format, 390 pages,Paperback, Uncorrected Proof, Seen Better Days but Interesting as a Collector's Item
Published 2006 by Jonathan Cape
#Fiction #BookClub #Contemporary #Family
