Book description
The much-anticipated new novel from the acclaimed author of 'The Gift '
- a blend of detective novel, historical fiction and the painful
coming-of-age of a confused young boy.
'Edgar was neither hard-bitten nor hard-boiled. He hadn't seen too much
- he'd hardly seen anything at all - and he was bursting, overflowing,
with inaccessible juvenile potency. No one would suspect him of a
dangerous agenda. But he could not drive a car. And he still needed
permission to stay out past suppertime.'
Edgar Pagan, nearly thirteen, detests his English mother's new
boyfriend, so when she takes her son away from him across the Atlantic
to spend time with his American father, it is a relief and a new
adventure for him. He is an unlikely detective, Edgar, but that is what
he becomes at the Pagan house, home to his grandmother Fay, and again
some years later when he sets down on paper the Pagan past, in
particular the peculiar circumstances of his father's ancestors in the
nineteenth century, 'the story of how I came to be me.'
'The Pagan House', David Flusfeder's extraordinary new novel, is the
story of how a family came to be established, of the extreme
nineteenth-century Christian sect, the Perfectionists, utopians with a
belief in free love, who built that family home. It is about the life
and tragic death of Mary Pagan, the shaping force in this unusual
family, and the impending death 150 years later of her descendent,
Edgar's grandmother, and the consequent destiny of that house. With its
blend of detective novel, historical fiction and the painful
coming-of-age of a confused young boy in Edgar, Flusfeder brilliantly
weaves these strands together with style and verve. 'Wise and generous:
a complete story and a very good one,' said Jonathan Franzen of
Flusfeder's last book, 'the best book you'll give yourself all year,'
said Will Self. With this new novel he has surpassed himself. 'In an
unobtrusive way this is quite a book…"The Pagan House" is the
kind of book that, as it eschews authorial stridency, plays down its
finest passages of prose and tells its best jokes in an undertone, risks
not being recognised as the small masterpiece that it is. After reading
it, though, you won't want it any other way.' The Daily Telegraph
'Flusfeder employs thriller-like pace to his narrative. The prose is
terse yet commanding and the historical passages hold up surprisingly
well. But where Flusfeder excels is the timing and tying individual
threads of disparate beings into an inevitable finale. How rare we
acknowledge we are the climax of our past, people passing down the
generation give us life, knowledge and qualities we could never imagine
acquiring on our own.' Sunday Business Post
'(A) madly brilliant, hilarious and tender portrait of adolescent
angst.' The Daily Mail David Flusfeder is the author of four novels,
Man Kills Woman, Like Plastic, which won the Encore Award, Morocco, and
The Gift.
