This is a beautifully articulate and poignant novel, at times it maintains a discreet solitary distance from its own moving story, ensuring that as moments of realisation steal into your consciousness and understanding flows into your heart… they stay with you. The author spirals through time, teases history and suggests new beginnings. The story branches three ways, breathtakingly different, remote yet entwined, flowing together and unfurling heartbreaking moments of perception and compassion. The isolation of the characters is shocking, they do not encourage affection or intimacy, their story isn't neat, tidy, clean or explained, you are instead left to observe, to recognise and so find yourself jolted and shaken into awareness, sorrow and regret and yet somehow a fluttering of hope steals across the pages for a story yet untold.
’Wuthering Heights’ and the Bronte family are intrinsically linked to this story, if you haven't yet met Emily, Charlotte and Anne, your journey through ’The Lost Child’ will potentially introduce you to some new companions. ~ Liz Robinson
Discover this heartrending story of orphans, outcasts and the grip of the past from award-winning novelist Caryl Phillips - inspired by Wuthering Heights. It is the 1960s. Isolated from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, Monica Johnson raises her sons in the shadow of the wild Yorkshire moors. But when her younger son Tommy, a loner who is bullied at school, disappears, the family bond is demolished - with devastating consequences. Deftly intertwined with this modern narrative is the story of the ragged childhood of Emily Bronte's Heathcliff, one of literature's most enigmatic lost boys. Recovering the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, The Lost Child is an exquisite novel about exile, freedom and what it is to belong. 'Heartbreaking...compelling' Independent
ISBN: | 9781529111569 |
Publication date: | 7th November 2019 |
Author: | Caryl Phillips |
Publisher: | Vintage an imprint of Vintage Publishing |
Format: | Paperback |
Pagination: | 272 pages |
Collections: | |
Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
Other Genres: |
Closing date: 30/05/2022
Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including Dancing in the Dark, Colour Me English, Crossing the River, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and A Distant Shore, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
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