HUMAN CROQUET
Kate Atkinson
‘Wonderfully
eloquent and forceful . . . brilliant and
engrossing’
Penelope
Fitzgerald, Evening
Standard
Once it had been
the great forest of Lythe – a vast and impenetrable thicket of
green. And here, in the beginning, lived the Fairfaxes, grandly, at
Fairfax Manor, visited once by the great Gloriana
herself.
But over the
centuries the forest had been destroyed, replaced by Streets of
Trees. The Fairfaxes have dwindled too; now they live in
‘Arden’
at the end of
Hawthorne Close and are hardly a family at all.
But Isobel
Fairfax, who drops into pockets of time and out again, knows about
the past. She is sixteen and waiting for the return of her mother –
the thin, dangerous Eliza with her scent of nicotine, Arpège and
sex, whose disappearance is part of the mystery that still remains
at the heart of the forest.
‘Vivid, richly
imaginative, hilarious and frightening by
turns’
Cressida
Connolly, Observer
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