Waterland

Zusatztext "Perfectly controlled! superbly written -- Waterland is original! compelling and narration of the highest order." -- The Guardian (U.K.) "Swift spins a tale of empire-building! land reclamation! brewers and sluice-minders! bewhiskered Victorian patriarchs! insane and visionary relicts.... I can't remember when I read a book of such strange! insidious! unsettling power with a more startling cast of characters." -- Books and Bookmen (U.K.) "Teems with energy! fertility! violence! madness -- demonstrates the irrepressible! wide-ranging talent of this young British writer." -- Washington Post Book World "A formidably intelligent book -- animated by an impressive! angry pity at what human creatures are capable of doing to one another in the name of love and need.... The most powerful novel I have read for some time." -- The New York Review of Books " Waterland appropriates the Fens as Moby Dick did whaling or Wuthering Heights the moors -- a beautiful! serious! and intelligent novel! admirably ambitious and original." -- The Observer (U.K.) "Rich! ingenious! inspired." -- The New York Times Informationen zum Autor Graham Swift is the author of six novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in London, England. Klappentext Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy. "Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their interweaving.... Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary verve and verbal felicity.... A fine and original work."--Los Angeles Times Excerpted from the Introduction I was sitting on the steps of a caravan. It was winter and the sun was out. The house we had bought was still a wreck. I was a junior editor at Penguin and Graham had given me the first sixty or so pages of his new novel. I had worked on Graham’s second novel Shuttlecock and we had become friends. This was his third novel. It was to be called Waterland . Almost at once, from the very opening, from those first few promises of stories and ancestry and mother’s milk, I knew instinctively that I was in the presence of something extra- ordinary, something which, when opened fully, was going to envelop me like a glorious burst of light, changing me and the world I lived in forever. Reading a great book is a discovery of its own. The reader feels an almost limitless thrill, like an archaeologist must when stumbling upon a fabled burial site or the lost skull of civilization. It is as if you have discovered this treasure by yourself, and it is yours and yours alone. You take possession of it, guard it jealously. Sure, that moment will pass. Later you will offer up its secrets to others, allow them to talk of it, handle it with (as far as you are concerned) disturbing familiarity, but for those precious hours and days it belongs to no one else, and you hug it closely, protecting every page. That was how I felt, reading those sixty pages. That is how everyone feels, first reading those sixty pages and beyond. It is yours, made just for you. What is more, to some unfathomable degree, it is your story too, in more ways than you thought possible. Circumstances changed. By the time Graham had finished the novel, I had moved to become editor of Picador. In those days Picador was solely a paperback house, but happily, partly thanks to our previous relationship, it came about that Waterland would be published by Heinemann in hardcover and a year later in paperback, at Picad...

Product details

• Authors: Graham Swift
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 31.03.1992
• EAN: 9780679739791
• ISBN: 978-0-679-73979-1
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 135 mm x 205 mm x 20 mm
• Series: VINTAGE BOOKS; Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature