Talking to the Dead
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3.7 • 7 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Talking to the Dead is bestselling author Helen Dunmore's fourth novel.
There's nothing closer than sisters . . .
Unloved by their distant mother, Isabel and Nina cemented their bond in childhood when tragedy struck the family. Many yeas later, with the difficult birth of Isabel's first child, it is Nina who comes to stay and help out her older sister. But Nina has other, important reasons for being under her sister's roof - not least of these is Isabel's husband, Richard.
The tragedy that drew two sisters together so many years ago still has the power to wrench them apart . . .
'A writer of quiet deadly power . . . it takes two paragraphs to hook you. Don't resist' Time Out
'Dunmore's capacity for hauntingly psychological storytelling is on brilliant display' Sunday Times
'Flies off the page, startling the reader with its brilliance' Financial Times
Helen Dunmore has published eleven novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness , which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphan; Counting the Stars and The Betrayal, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The mesmerizing fourth novel from this young British writer, winner of Britain's Orange Prize, is her U.S. debut, and it will surely make her name known on this side of the Atlantic. The book's prelude--a searing prose poem so evocative that it renders almost palpable the yew-scent of a sizzling hot summer graveyard--is a promise of sensuality and intrigue that increases in intensity and produces a luxuriously gripping narrative. Nina and Isabel have a secret brother: his cot death when they were small changed their lives irrevocably. More than two decades later, when Isabel almost dies with the birth of her own son, Nina comes to help her out at her secluded country home. We quickly sense the deep bonds and tensions between the two sisters as Dunmore ingeniously swings the reader's sympathy from one to the other. Are we dealing with an angel and a devil? If so, which is which? Isabel's unmitigated selfishness seems shocking until Nina casually betrays her. Under the summer sun, long-smothered family nightmares inevitably surface. Despite the bristling heat her narrative conveys, Dunmore's style is coolly beautiful, with many a memorable phrase. "Things are happening here that safely belong on the news, but we can't switch them off," muses Nina, as the elusive sense of horror builds slowly into a thunderous finale, and the devil is revealed.
