The Red House
Mark Haddon
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0307949257
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
From Mark Haddon, the bestselling author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, comes a dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family life.
Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister and her family to join his family for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Against the backdrop of a strange family gathering, Haddon skillfully weaves together the stories of eight very different people forced into close quarters. The Red House is a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly guarded secrets and illicit desires, painting a portrait of contemporary family life that is at once bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt.
The Four Corners of the Sky: A Novel
Accidental Ethnography: An Inquiry into Family Secrecy (Writing Lives)
The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel
Start Smart!: Building Brain Power in the Early Years
I Only Want to Get Married Once: The 10 Essential Questions for Getting It Right the First Time
War and Family Life (Risk and Resilience in Military and Veteran Families)
steps. Angela hasn’t walked more than a mile in the last ten years but she doesn’t want to abandon ship for a second day running and she is determined to prove Dominic wrong, to be a real part of the family. Alex is reading the Observer sports section (Bowyer received a gift of a cross inside the six-yard box but headed it wide). Distantly, the toilet flushes. Where’s Melissa? Richard finds himself worrying about her in a way that he hasn’t done before. These vague thoughts of fatherhood,
between the church and the world which had served her so poorly. She accepted the invitation to that first service as proof of her own broadmindedness and needed a great deal of it to get through the sixty minutes. Embarrassment, mostly, at the way these people spoke and sang like over-excited children, and mild disgust when everyone was invited to hug their neighbour and she found herself briefly in the arms of a man who, frankly, smelt. Which would have been her remaining impression had not her
and I’m frightened, Dom. If you get a chance, can you ring me, please? Episode 39 of the Mother and Son show. He deleted the message. The truth was that she disgusted him, something moist and wretched about her, a child at forty-two. He couldn’t remember her once expressing real unadulterated joy, only that desperate hunger when they made love (fill me up … push it right inside me …) which was thrilling at first but which now sounded like a need to be crushed out or used up. If it wasn’t him it
then we shall see face to face. It wasn’t simple, was it, or quick? The coin flipped, and flipped, and flipped. Time speeding up now, Lauren answering a door in a street Daisy doesn’t recognise. Husband, two kids, the telly on in the background, face tired and lined but beautiful. We were at school together …? Are you sure …? Turning and running down the street in tears. And now she was crying for real and Alex rubbed her back and said, Come on, girl. Benjy looked up. Is Daisy OK? And Alex was
Dominic and Richard stood looking over the garden wall, gentlemen on the foredeck, a calm, green sea beyond. Angela tells me you’ve got yourself a job in a bookshop. Dominic had been unemployed for nine months, apparently. Bespoke or chain? Waterstone’s, said Dominic. Best job I’ve ever done, to be honest. He looked up. No contrails because of the volcanic ash. The way the fields stopped halfway up the hill and gave way to gorse and bracken and scree, that darkness where the summit met the sky,