Before The Knife by Carolyn Slaughter
Carolyn Slaughter is the author of ten novels, but for the last 12 years she has been completely silent. She had become conscious that there was something hidden in her past that had always haunted her fiction but which she had never fully faced. This memoir is the result of confronting the truth about her traumatic childhood. Carolyn's father was in the colonial service, but he lacked power and was ashamed of his Irish origins. In private, he was capable of acts of absolute sadism. When Carolyn was small, they lived comfortably in Swaziland having left India during the Partition. But when she turned six, things changed. Her mother gave birth to another daughter and they were posted to a remote area in the Kalahari desert. Bereft of a civilized social life, her mother plunged into a deep depression and turned completely away from Carolyn. While her older sister found friends and left for boarding school, Carolyn suffered a desperate sense of abandonment and loss and turned to the landscape of the Kalahari itself for solace. The stark fact that Carolyn was first raped by her father at the age of six is contained within the prologue and epilogue of this book. What lies in between is the story of an extraordinary childhood in Africa and a moving depiction of the complexities at the root of our relationships with mother, father, siblings
Carolyn Slaughter's first novel The Story Of The Weasel won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She followed it with nine further novels. She now works as a psychotherapist and lives in America.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780552999885 |
| ISBN 10 | 0552999881 |
| Title | Before The Knife |
| Author | Carolyn Slaughter |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Transworld Publishers Ltd |
| Year published | 2003-01-01 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |