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The Looking Glass: A Novel
The Looking Glass: A Novel
The Looking Glass: A Novel
Ebook258 pages4 hours

The Looking Glass: A Novel

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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A lushly imagined, sensual novel about memory, desire, and the power of storytelling, from a Booker Prize nominee.

Geneviève is an outsider, raised in an orphanage, now living an isolated existence as a maid to the widowed Madame Patin in a small French village. A teller and collector of stories, she is entranced by Madame Patin's oft-told folktales, which mask cunning and doom beneath beauty. As Geneviève grows into a woman, her life becomes both more sensual and more dangerous. She flees her village home, escaping to another word-spinner, a poet who captivates women -- his mother, his mistress, his niece's governess, and, soon, Geneviève. The poet is kind, but he too is a collector of stories -- and sometimes of secrets beyond words.

An exquisite, knowing, and irresistible novel, The Looking Glass introduces to an American audience "one of Britian's best novelists" (The Independent on Sunday).

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 22, 2013
ISBN9781466854963
The Looking Glass: A Novel
Author

Michèle Roberts

Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House, which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and, most recently, the highly-acclaimed Ignorance, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013. Her memoir Paper Houses was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud: Stories of Sex and Love. Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres.

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Rating: 3.346153923076923 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was rather an enjoyable read. It follows the life of an orphan-turned-domestic servant in early 20th century Normandy, and touches on the lives of four other women who are connected to her through a male character. Throughout the novel the author weaves in exquisite descriptive detail of setting and domestic life (she almost makes ironing sound enjoyable). On the downside, I found the structure of the book didn't quite work, and there was some crude language near the end that was jarring and didn't fit the rest of the novel. Overall, a quiet, moody work.

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The Looking Glass - Michèle Roberts

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