Bøker av Edward Carey

Edward Carey's witty and entrancing story of a young woman trapped in a ramshackle English playhouse – and the mysterious figure who threatens its very survival.Norwich, 1901. Edith Holler spends her days among the eccentric denizens of the Holler Theatre, warned by her domineering father that the playhouse will literally tumble down if she should ever leave.Fascinated by tales of the city she knows only from afar, young Edith decides to write a play of her own about Mawther Meg, a monstrous figure said to have used the blood of countless children to make the local delicacy, Beetle Spread. But when her father suddenly announces his engagement to a peculiar woman named Margaret Unthank, Edith scrambles to protect her father, the theatre, and her play – the one thing that’s truly hers – from the newcomer’s sinister designs. Teeming with unforgettable characters and illuminated by Carey’s trademark illustrations, Edith Holler is a surprisingly modern fable of one young woman’s struggle to escape her family’s control and craft her own creative destiny.

The city of Entralla - along with Gondal, Brobdingnag and the Emerald City - is not somewhere you are likely to have visited. Only one guidebook to the place exists, despite its historic landmarks and the considerable civic pride of its inhabitants. Alva and Irva are identical twin sisters, and Entralla is their home. By nature, Alva is an explorer, and longs to travel the world. Irva is a recluse, for whom every step outside the house is an ordeal. But the twins belong together and cannot survive without each other. It is when Irva refuses to leave the house at all that the major work of their lives begins: Alva wanders the city streets, observing, taking notes, measuring, and reporting her findings to Irva, who painstakingly recreates a miniature Entralla. In Alva and Irva, Edward Carey takes the reader on an enchanting journey through a city of the imagination; the twins are mesmerizing heroines whose conflicting desires contain the seeds of both their destruction and their salvation.

Observatory Mansions was once the Orme family's ancestral home. Now it is a crumbing apartment block, stranded on a traffic island and peopled with eccentrics. Alice Orme never stirs from her bed, her husband lives in his old armchair, and Francis, their son, practises his own art of stillness as a human statue in the centre of the decaying city. He lives by his Law of White Gloves, never touching anything without their protection, and collects items for his secret exhibition - items stolen, not because of any monetary worth, but because they are treasured by the owners. This careful routine is shaken by the arrival of a new resident, Anna Tap, half blind and vulnerable, but with a strange gift for inspiring trust. As the other residents gradually open their hearts to her, Francis realises he must act before she forces him to confront his own past, and before she finds out about the mysterious final object in his exhibition. But as the currents of memory and desire swirl within Observatory Mansions' crumbling walls, it seems the sinister Porter has plans of his own... Edward Carey's debut is a novel of immense originality - a strangely haunting landscape occupied by compelling and unforgettable characters.

From little beginnings: the extraordinary story of a singular, diminutive crumb of a servant girl turned entertainment mogul.

And rats, there are rats everywhere. Someone has stolen a certain plug. Someone is lighting a certain box of matches. All will come tumbling down. The Iremongers have come to London.

'Roald Dahl by way of Charles Dickens' - Vox.com Dark, gothic and delightfully macabre, the Iremonger family return... In the Iremonger family offices, Grandfather Umbitt Iremonger broods: in his misery and fury at the people of London, he has found a way of making everyday objects assume human shape, and turning real people into objects.

'Roald Dahl by way of Charles Dickens' - Vox.com The Iremongers have taken up what was not wanted and wanted it.Clod is an Iremonger. At the centre is Heap House, a puzzle of houses, castles, homes and mysteries reclaimed from the city and built into a living maze of staircases and scurrying rats.