Crusoe's Daughter
Regular price
€17.50
'Touching, terribly sad, funny: a smashing novel' The Times
In 1904, six-year-old Polly Flint is sent by her sea captain father to live with her two holy aunts in a house by the sea on England's northeast coast. The house is so close to the sea it seems to toss like a ship, and so isolated, she might be marooned on an island.
There Polly lives for 81 years, while the century rages around her and Victorian order becomes nuclear dread. Through it all, she returns again and again to the story of Robinson Crusoe, who, marooned like her, fends off the madness of isolation with imagination.
Jane Gardam is the only writer to have been twice awarded the Whitbread/Costa Prize for Best Novel of the Year, for The Queen of the Tambourine and The Hollow Land. She also holds a Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature. She is the author of five volumes of acclaimed stories: Black Faces, White Faces (David Higham Prize and the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize); The Pangs of Love (Katherine Mansfield Prize); Going into a Dark House (Silver Pen Award from PEN); Missing the Midnight; and The People on Privilege Hill. Her novels include God on the Rocks, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Faith Fox; The Flight of the Maidens; the bestselling Old Filth, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2005; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends. Jane Gardam was born in Yorkshire. She now lives in east Kent.