INTRODUCED BY JANE GARDAM
‘A small Gothic masterpiece . . . I have read it many times, and with every re-read I marvel again at its many qualities’ SARAH WATERS
‘It projects its fantastic story with a tangible realness . . . A wonderful and original novel’ ALAN HOLLINGHURST
‘She shows mastery of the structures of a fast-moving narrative and a consistent backdrop to the ecstasies and agonies of the human condition’ JANE GARDAM, SPECTATOR
Growing up in Edwardian South London, Alice Rowlands longs for romance and excitement, for a release from a life that is dreary, restrictive and lonely. Her father, a vet, is harsh and domineering; his new girlfriend brash and lascivious. Alice seeks refuge in memories and fantasies, in her rapturous longing for Nicholas, a handsome young sailor and in the blossoming of what she perceives as her occult powers.
A series of strange events unfolds that leads her, dressed in bridal white to a scene of ecstatic triumph and disaster among the crowds on Clapham Common. The Vet’s Daughter is a uniquely vivid, witty and touching story of love and mystery.
‘A small Gothic masterpiece . . . I have read it many times, and with every re-read I marvel again at its many qualities’ SARAH WATERS
‘It projects its fantastic story with a tangible realness . . . A wonderful and original novel’ ALAN HOLLINGHURST
‘She shows mastery of the structures of a fast-moving narrative and a consistent backdrop to the ecstasies and agonies of the human condition’ JANE GARDAM, SPECTATOR
Growing up in Edwardian South London, Alice Rowlands longs for romance and excitement, for a release from a life that is dreary, restrictive and lonely. Her father, a vet, is harsh and domineering; his new girlfriend brash and lascivious. Alice seeks refuge in memories and fantasies, in her rapturous longing for Nicholas, a handsome young sailor and in the blossoming of what she perceives as her occult powers.
A series of strange events unfolds that leads her, dressed in bridal white to a scene of ecstatic triumph and disaster among the crowds on Clapham Common. The Vet’s Daughter is a uniquely vivid, witty and touching story of love and mystery.
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Reviews
Told in the first person by a young girl, [The Vet's Daughter] has the vividness and innocence [and] the revelatory intensity of the narrations of Pip or young David Copperfield. It projects its fantastic story with a tangible realness and manages to make public and inevitable a realm of private sensation close to nightmare . . . A wonderful and original novel
The Vet's Daughter is Barbara Comyns's fourth and most startling novel . . . she shows mastery of the structures of a fast-moving narrative and a consistent backdrop to the ecstasies and agonies of the human condition
A small Gothic masterpiece
The strange offbeat talent of Miss Comyns and that innocent eye which observes with childlike simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrence, these have never, I think, been more impressively exercised than in The Vet's Daughter
A wonderful and original novel.
A small Gothic masterpiece.
