"A beautiful book."
This short novel is intriguing and playful, with even the text shifting about on the page, as though we’re eavesdropping onto the characters’ overlapping conversations. Lanny, is about a young boy who loves nature and lives in a village not too far from London, and who goes missing. He has the regular two parents, and parents’ friends, but there is also another character: the mysterious and mythical Dead Papa Toothwort who is part of the earth and yet can shape-shift to the size of flea or into an old bath.
He can slide in and out of people, and he is often angry. What he likes best of all and what makes him happy is to listen to the villagers talk, and he especially likes to listen to Lanny. Dead Papa Toothwort is a kind of modern day Greenman, symbolising rebirth, death, and the green of life. And he neatly compares with Lanny, who is very much a human, but also a kind of delightful fairy child who still sees the wonder in the natural world. A beautiful book.
Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize An entrancing new novel by the author of the prizewinning Grief Is the Thing with Feathers There's a village an hour from London. It's no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land and to the land's past. It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical figure local schoolchildren used to draw as green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny. With Lanny, Max Porter extends the potent and magical space he created in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. This brilliant novel will ensorcell readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Porter's reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize An entrancing new novel by the author of the prizewinning Grief Is the Thing with Feathers There's a village an hour from London. It's no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about.
Lanny features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, General Fiction, Fiction
Paperback, Hardback, Ebook. Not Available.
Lanny was written by Max Porter and published by Graywolf Press
Lanny has 224 pages
