You are here

Back to top

The Porpoise: A Novel (Hardcover)

The Porpoise: A Novel Cover Image
$27.95
Email or call for price.

Description


In a bravura feat of storytelling, Mark Haddon calls upon narratives ancient and modern to tell the story of Angelica, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her father. When a young man named Darius discovers their secret, he is forced to escape on a boat bound for the Mediterranean. To his surprise he finds himself travelling backwards over two thousand years to a world of pirates and shipwrecks, of plagues and miracles and angry gods. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, Haddon conjures the worlds of Angelica and her would-be savior in thrilling fashion. As profound as it is entertaining, The Porpoise is a stirring and endlessly inventive novel from one of our finest storytellers.

About the Author


Mark Haddon is the author of the bestselling novels The Red House and A Spot of Bother. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and is the basis for the Tony Award–winning play. He is the author of a collection of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, has written and illustrated numerous children’s books, and has won awards for both his radio dramas and his television screenplays. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and lives in Oxford, England.

Praise For…


"Staggeringly ambitious, innovative, beautifully written. . .The Porpoise has the pace of a really good thriller, combined with a subtlety and depth that few thrillers possess." 
--Pat Barker, author of The Silence of the Girls and the Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road

"A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery. Ancient and modern overlap in exhilarating ways, it's like romping through a literary Netflix: an episode of something historical and bloody, then something slick and contemporary, then something really weird and unnerving. . .The Porpoise is a joy to read.
--Max Porter, author of the International Dylan Thomas Prize-winning Grief is the Thing With Feathers

"Mark Haddon cuts down to the grittiness of humanity every time he writes. The Porpoise is a beautiful, unputdownable, ancient tangle with its own sweeping tides and dangerous depths." 
--
Daisy Johnson, author of the Booker Prize finalist Everything Under


"An artfully crafted story of layered lives. . .Haddon’s ambitious tale captures the ethos of tragic Shakespearean vibrations and the tangle of lives that magically intersect. The prose is exquisite and elevates this story that blends reality and mythology to great effect."
--Publishers Weekly 

Product Details
ISBN: 9780385544313
ISBN-10: 0385544316
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication Date: June 18th, 2019
Pages: 320