Lanny
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Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019
From the award-winning author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers comes a dark, playful, propulsive novel about an ethereal young boy who attracts the attention of a mythical, menacing force.
There's a village an hour from London. It's no different from many others today: one pub, one church, red-brick 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 fabled figure local schoolchildren used to draw 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, enchanting 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 enrapture 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.
About this Author
MAX PORTER is the author of The Death of Francis Bacon, Lanny, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the recipient of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award.
Reviews
Praise for Lanny:
"Porter is an enchanter with words. . . . Elegantly mysterious: a story worthy of an M.R. James or even a Henry James and a welcome return by an author eminently worth reading." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"In his bold second novel, Porter combines pastoral, satire, and fable in the entrancing tale of a boy who vanishes from an idyllic British village. . . . This is a dark and thrilling excavation into a community's legend-packed soil." -Publishers Weekly, starred review
"I don't want to use reviewer-y superlatives, but I don't think I will read anything else like it this year" -The Scotsman
"Despite reading it twice, I suspect Lanny will be a novel I will return to again, simply to absorb the strangeness of the story, the cleverness of the structure, the authenticity of the dialogue and the ethereal mystery that surrounds the book's titular character. For those who are put off by experimental fiction, and I confess to being one, this is a novel to shatter your prejudices." -John Boyne, The Irish Times
"Reading Lanny is like going to the back of the garden to find the exact spot where magic and menace meet. It's delightful and dark, stark and stylish, and as strange as it is scary-I loved it." -Claire Cameron
"In Lanny Max Porter has expanded on his innovative hybrid mode while remaining faithful to our species-wide tradition of storytelling through myth, magic, and parable, but also through the harrowing minutiae of being alive in the trying hours of a small town ruptured by loss. The result is a powerful yet tender reclamation of the imagination, love, and artmaking--all of it a brilliant defense of the outsider's tenuous foothold in society." -Ocean Vuong
"It takes a special kind of genius to create something which is both so strange and yet so compulsive." -Mark Haddon
"Books this good don't come along very often. It's a novel like no other, an exhilarating, disquieting, joyous read. It will reach into your chest and take hold of your heart. Every page is a joy. It's a novel to press into the hands of everyone you know and say, read this." -Maggie O'Farrell
"Max Porter writes like no one else and it is impossible not to be swept along and astounded. Lanny is a wonder." -Daisy Johnson
"The writing is stunning and deeply affecting. The plot thunders along. This is a book that resolutely refuses to be categorised but to get somewhere close, think: Under Milk Wood meets Broadchurch." -Nathan Filer
"It shouldn't be possible for a book to be simultaneously heart-stopping, heart-shaking and pulse-racing, but that is only one of the extraordinary feats Max Porter pulls off in this astonishing novel." -Kamila Shamsie
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