The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns

The Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife's death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own.

Harrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King, The Vet's Daughter is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.

Barbara Comyns (1909-1992) was born in Bidfordon-Avon, in the English county of Warwickshire, one of six children of an increasingly unsuccessful Birmingham brewer. Living on the run-down but romantic family estate and receiving her education from governesses, she began to write and illustrate stories at the age of ten. After her father's death, she attended art school in London and married a painter, with whom she had two children she supported by trading antiques and classic cars, modeling, breeding poodles, and renovating apartments. A second marriage, to Richard Comyns Carr, who worked in the Foreign Office, took place during World War II. Comyns wrote her first book, Sisters by a River (1947), a series of sketches based on her childhood, while living in the country to escape the Blitz, which is also when she made an initial sketch for The Vet's Daughter (1959). This, however, she put aside to complete Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950) and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954). The Vet's Daughter was published in 1959. Among Comyns's other books are the novels The Skin Chairs (1962) and The Juniper Tree (1985), and Out of the Red into the Blue (1960), a work of nonfiction about Spain, where she lived for eighteen years.

Sadie Stein is a writer and critic living in New York.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781590170298
ISBN 10	1590170296
Title	The Vet's Daughter
Author	Barbara Comyns
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2003-04-30
Number of pages	152
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.