Only a Lodger...And Hardly That by Vesna Main

Only a Lodger...And Hardly That by Vesna Main

A novel in five parts, Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That puts Vesna Main's power of beautiful observation on full display as she explores how writing stories about one's ancestors is key route to learning about and fashioning one's own identity. While the stories are self-contained, together they form a narrative whole that approaches this age-old idea from five unique perspectives. In 'The Eye/I', we meet someone called She, who obsessively tells the story of her childhood and adolescence to an unnamed narrator. 'The Acrobat' is a sequence of prose poems, written in the style of magic realism, which tell the story of Maria and her life-changing adolescent encounter with a flying circus performer. The female protagonist of the first section narrates 'The Dead', describing the secret life of a grandfather she never truly knew and his unusual habit of sending family members anonymous parcels of carefully chosen books. In 'The Poet', she examines four family photographs in order to piece together a story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria. The final section, 'The Suitor', is a first-person narrative told by Mr Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down. 'The Croatian-born novelist Vesna Main writes unusual and formally ambitious fiction. . . . Only a Lodger... And Hardly That is subtitled 'a fictional autobiography' and hovers somewhere between memoir and novel, also playing with perspective and style.'- New Statesman Recommends '[Vesna] Main is a writer who works subliminal for all it's worth.'- Elaine Aldred, Strange Alliances

Vesna Main was born in Zagreb, Croatia. She is a graduate of comparative literature and holds a PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham. A lecturer at universities in Nigeria and the UK, she also worked at the BBC and as a college teacher. Main has written for numerous journals and published two novels, A Woman with No Clothes On and The Reader the Writer. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines; a collection, Temptation, A User's Guide, was published in December 2017.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780857426468
ISBN 10	085742646X
Title	Only a Lodger...And Hardly That
Author	Vesna Main
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Seagull Books London Ltd
Year published	2020-02-21
Number of pages	312
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.