Book description
Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and
everyone sailing under a different sky.
After his mother's death, Richard, a newly remarried hospital
consultant, decides to build bridges with his estranged sister,
inviting Angela and her family for a week in a rented house on the
Welsh border. Four adults and four children, a single family and all
of them strangers. Seven days of shared meals, log fires, card games
and wet walks.
But in the quiet and stillness of the valley, ghosts begin to rise
up. The parents Richard thought he had. The parents Angela thought she
had. Past and present lovers. Friends, enemies, victims, saviours. And
watching over all of them from high on the dark hill, Karen, Angela's
stillborn daughter.
The Red House is about the extraordinariness of the ordinary,
weaving the words and thoughts of the eight characters together with
those fainter, stranger voices - of books and letters and music, of
the dead who once inhabited these rooms, of the ageing house itself
and the landscape in which it sits.
Once again Mark Haddon, bestselling author of The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and A Spot of
Bother, has written a novel that is funny, poignant and deeply
insightful about human lives.
Mark Haddon is an author, illustrator and screenwriter who has
written fifteen books for children and won two BAFTAs. His bestselling
novel,
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
, was published simultaneously by Jonathan Cape and David Fickling in
2003. It won seventeen literary prizes, including the Whitbread Award.
His poetry collection,
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the
Village Under the Sea
,
was published by Picador in 2005, and his last novel,
The Red House
, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2012. He lives in Oxford.
