Little Stranger, A - Hardcover

McWilliam, Candia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385263090 ISBN 13: 9780385263092

Publisher: Doubleday, 1989

Synopsis

Candia McWilliam was a joint winner of the 1988 Betty Trask Award with "A Case of Knives", and her second novel tells - sometimes with humour - the story of two women whose blindness threatens their own lives and the future of a child. It is an intricately woven tale of domestic horror.

About this title

About the Author:

Candia McWilliam was born in Edinburgh. She is the author of A Case of Knives (1988), which won a Betty Trask Prize; A Little Stranger (1989); Debatable Land (1994), which was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour in its Italian translation for the best foreign novel of the year; and a collection of stories, Wait Till I Tell You (1997). In 2006 she began to suffer from the effects of blepharospasm and became functionally blind as a result. In 2009 she underwent an operation to partially reverse the condition. What to Look for in Winter won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for literature, the Spear's Book Award for memoir, the Hawthornden Prize, and was shortlisted for the Mind Book of the Year Award and the Duff Cooper Prize.

From Publishers Weekly:

A contemporary The Turn of the Screw , McWilliam's slim second novel (after A Case of Knives ) did very well in England, but may be less successful here. There is no mistaking, however, that this is the work of a talented writer. Precisely articulated, carefully structured and tightly controlled, the story is narrated by Daisy, the young wife of a rich man living on a country estate, who hires Margaret Price as a nanny for her little boy. Addicted to wearing cute clothes decorated with adorable animals, Margaret seems an exemplary nanny, even, Daisy convinces herself, "perfection." In the languid torpor of a new pregnancy, complicated by a deep-seated depression about her place in the world and "a perverse will to be polite at any cost," Daisy blinds herself to the dangerous character of super-efficient, humorless Margaret--until it is almost too late. McWilliam gives Daisy a sardonic voice, appropriate to her trenchant asides about behavior in the top strata of British society; these mordant observations grant the novel its edge. Although tautly measured to achieve mounting tension, the narrative is, in the end, a little too mannered and pretentious, and Daisy too self-centered to win the reader's sympathy.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0385263090
• ISBN 13: 9780385263092
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 181