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Summary
Summary
Calamity Jane Eyre arrives at Cold Comfort Farm in this brilliant comedy of manners and identity by a Whitbread-winning young author. A novel that makes you laugh out loud and that you put down with regret.--London Literary Review.
Author Notes
Rachel Cusk was born on Feb 8, 1967 in Canada. She spent much of her childhood in Los Angeles and finished her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. her education at St Mary's Convent, Cambridge. In 2003, Rachel Cusk was nominated by Granta magazine as one of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'. That year she published The Lucky Ones (2003), her fourth novel, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. Since then she has published four more novels; her latest is Outline (2014). She has also written several non-fiction books. A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001) is a personal exploration of motherhood. The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy (2009) is a memoir about time in southern Italy. In 2015 she made the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist with her title Outline.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Whitbread winner Cusk's first novel to appear in America is a touching, hilarious narrative by a modern-day Jane Eyre who renounces her life in London in the hope of finding an uncomplicated existence in the Sussex countryside. After a frenzied throwing out of "every vestige of love I had ever earned," unhappy, solitary Stella arrives in a tiny village to answer an advertisement for the job of caretaker to Martin Madden, the handicapped son of a rich farming family. Stella is prone to an "inner derangement": by the end of her second day among the nutty Maddens, she has broken out in hives, walked through a thorny hedge to avoid the front door, acquired a terrible sunburn and vomited. "It seemed incredible that so much could have gone wrong in so short a time," she laments. Cusk's hyperbolic descriptions of these and the many other calamities in Stella's everyday life demonstrate that her desire to "exist in a state of no complexity whatever" will prove to be impossible, especially since her surly charge, Martin, is, in her early estimation, an "evil dwarf." Cusk has a marvelous knack for revealing character in a few deft lines of dialogue; Stella herself is utterly lovable and her pain genuine. Later, when Stella and Martin have grown close, he tells her,"Everyone has to face things. It's the only way." Stella's particularly poignant attempt at facing her own inner oppressionand the surprising secrets in her pastwill win Cusk many new readers, who will be eager to find her previous work, Saving Alice and The Temporary. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The US debut of British novelist Cusk (the 1993 Whitbread-winning Saving Agnes). Anyone whos read Cold Comfort Farm lately and wondered why no one can write like Stella Gibbons anymore will feel vindicated by Cusk, whose tale of the innocent city slicker discovering the lurid mysteries of country life may well revive the genre. Her heroine, Stella Benson, is bored with the routines of her life and so answers an ad seeking a kind, intelligent and considerate girl to help parents with their disabled son. Soon after, shes quit her job, left her apartment, and written to her parents and boyfriend, telling them that shes leaving London and theyre not to look for her. Those minor details behind her, she takes the train to Sussex and finds the remote village of Hilltop, where Piers and Pamela Madden have employed her to look after their crippled son Martin. Although the arrangement appears idealprivate cottage, decent wages, plenty of privacy, fresh air, and sunshineStella quickly picks up hints that something is a bit off in the Madden household. Martin, to begin with, is an ill-tempered young lout (he introduces himself to Stella with a cheery Fuck off) who seems, despite his wheelchair, to need less looking after than his strangely distracted parents do. Meanwhile, the manager of the Madden farm, Mr. Trimmer, is a middle- aged bachelor intent on seducing the new governess, and a local oddball named Al tells her all sorts of horrible things about her employers. What exactly is going on? Are the Maddens lunatics? Is Stella in some sort of trap? What was she running from in London? And can she really settle down to country life? As in all good comedies, the questions are more important than the answers, but the answers cant be said to disappoint. Neither can the story. Witty, sharp, strangely good-natured: the sort of book a person is sorry to put down.
