‘Unforgettable and utterly affecting. You can’t turn the pages fast enough’ Dave EggersJudy Budnitz, author of the Orange Prize shortlisted novel If I Told You Once and the critically acclaimed collection Flying Leap. creates her own brand of stark, dystopian reality in this impressive collection of blisteringly inventive and surreal new stories. Budnitz's first-person narrators are pitch perfect, helping the reader to see from their perspective, no matter how odd it might be. Clever, comic and...
The astonishing Orange Prize-shortlisted debut from the author of ‘Flying Leap’ and ‘Nice Big American Baby’.This is a truly strange and striking tale that begins in the deep, and deeply magical, European forest, in the world depicted in Chagall’s paintings and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and proceeds to tell the story of four generations of women from one fated family.Budnitz builds her book with wit and art somewhere in the gaps between magic realism, family saga and female bildungsroman. She marries...
The Brothers Grimm take lessons in fiction from Angela Carter to produce this uncanny and surreal work.Judy Budnitz might just be the most exciting and unusual literary figure to emerge from the US literary thicket in 2000. She marries great technical skill to quirky humour and dizzying metaphor. She has an uncanny knack for the destabilizing and indelible image, but does not abandon sense for sensibility. She is always readable, albeit strangely so. She might yet be an Americanized heir to the...
