Alva & Irva by Edward Carey
One of the strangest – and most tantalising – novels this year' - Metro The city of Entralla – along with Gondal, Brobdingnag and the Emerald City – is not somewhere you are likely to have visited. Only one guidebook to the place exists, despite its historic landmarks and the considerable civic pride of its inhabitants. Alva and Irva are identical twin sisters, and Entralla is their home. By nature, Alva is an explorer, and longs to travel the world. Irva is a recluse, for whom every step outside the house is an ordeal. But the twins belong together and cannot survive without each other. It is when Irva refuses to leave the house at all that the major work of their lives begins: Alva wanders the city streets, observing, taking notes, measuring, and reporting her findings to Irva, who painstakingly recreates a miniature Entralla. In Alva and Irva, Edward Carey takes the reader on an enchanting journey through a city of the imagination; the twins are mesmerizing heroines whose conflicting desires contain the seeds of both their destruction and their salvation.
‘Out of the bleached calico of the tale of the 6ft twins emerges a very witty debate about reality, about the way that people cling to the past, about how people define themselves. . Carey involves you quietly in the way we live secret lives, the way we try to wring order out of chaos, the way time tinkers with memory and history.’ * Independent *
‘The drama of Alva and Irva, flung apart, then back together, by history and happenstance, is gestural, graceful, balletic.’ * Guardian *
‘Carey takes great care to describe Entralla, to make it a credible place, and the love story between his siblings, which passes through infatuation and resentment to reconciliation, is told with real power.’ * The Times *
‘Its charm comes from the fact that it is sweetly sentimental about the pleasures and pains of belonging to a place and being clear that it owns you and not the other way around . . . This is a smart little novel of ideas about odd people for whom we end up caring more than we expect.’ * Time Out *
‘The drama of Alva and Irva, flung apart, then back together, by history and happenstance, is gestural, graceful, balletic.’ * Guardian *
‘Carey takes great care to describe Entralla, to make it a credible place, and the love story between his siblings, which passes through infatuation and resentment to reconciliation, is told with real power.’ * The Times *
‘Its charm comes from the fact that it is sweetly sentimental about the pleasures and pains of belonging to a place and being clear that it owns you and not the other way around . . . This is a smart little novel of ideas about odd people for whom we end up caring more than we expect.’ * Time Out *
Edward Carey is a novelist, visual artist and playwright. Born in England, Edward Carey teaches Creative Writing at the University of Austin, Texas. He was awarded the prestigious Italian Fernanda Pivano Prize in 2016. His novels include Observatory Mansions, Alva & Irva, The Iremonger Trilogy, Little, and The Swallowed Man.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781529031164 |
| ISBN 10 | 1529031168 |
| Title | Alva & Irva |
| Author | Edward Carey |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Pan Macmillan |
| Year published | 2019-03-21 |
| Number of pages | 224 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |