Product Description

Secrets and lies linger in the very walls of the solid old Normandy house where Therese and Leonie, French and English cousins, grow up after the war. Intrigued by adults' guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village's buried shame, a shame that will haunt them both for the rest of their lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #217959 in Books
• Published on: 1995-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
'Remarkable and beautifully written' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'A brave and richly imagined novel, full of thrilling set pieces. The new prestige it seems likely to earn for one of our best writers is long overdue.' GUARDIAN 'Subtle and persuasive' COSMOPOLITAN 'An intense piece of writing, in which the transfigured mundane world of recipes, parental prohibitions and almost ritualised gossip is posed against official purity and religiosity, and shown to be superior.' TLS 'The writing is English at its very best... the prose pulses with a sense of dangerous energy, only just held in check... compelling... incisive and brilliant.' INDEPENDENT 'It makes for a strong, concentrated read, deftly managed by the author, and I am nor surprised that the Booker Judges put it on their shortlist.' THE TIMES 'Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, this novel deserves to win.' NEW STATESMAN AND SOCIETY 'Few will deny the artistry with which it is written, or its dark, unsettling grace.' TIME OUT 'Remarkable and beautifully written novel... her best book yet.' Hermoine Lee, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY 'Writing of the highest order... certainly deserves to be read.' THE SPECTATOR

GUARDIAN
'A brave and richly imagined novel, full of thrilling set pieces'

Cosmopolitan
'Subtle and persuasive'

Customer Reviews

One to treasure
Given its French setting, I would immediately recommend this exquisitely written novel to anyone who has marvelled over the consummate skill behind Monet’s Impressionist paintings of Rouen Cathedral: indistinct blurs which come into focus when you step away from them. And, in a literary context, one of those novels about a difficult and ambiguous past, where the reader reconstructs that past along with the main characters.
Considering that so little is explicitly said, the summer spent by two adolescent girls in post-Second World War France is vividly rendered. The allusive titles of the chapters - “The Frying-Pan”, “The Oranges”, “The Ironing-Board” - are an important clue to the oppressively domestic setting, but also to the way in which deep and disturbing truths lie behind apparently ordinary objects. And the same is true of words. “Her words shot out in a clatter”, reads one sentence about half-way through the narrative. And, throughout the novel, words do indeed clatter, and resound and reverberate, echoing and amplifying earlier words, combining to show how deep and unpleasant truths are to be found beneath platitudinous surfaces.
The veneer of civilised behaviour is always thin and precarious in Michèle Roberts’s novel. And there are dark forests and dark cellars to mirror the dark secrets the novel gradually unfolds. The whole novel is a dark diamond, and one which demands to be contemplated more than once.

Immediately draws the reader in and won't let go!
"Daughters of the House, by Michele Roberts, is an outstanding novel. Roberts retells the story of St. Therese of Lisieux with a new twist. It is a historical fiction set in the 1950's, about Therese's life before she enters the convent. It is littered with little details to make the story more interesting and believable. Her way of describing things is so simple, that it incorporates the reader into the story. The characters, too, are believable and likeable. "Daughters of the House" gives a glimpse of what life was like for Leonie and Therese in France. The secrets they discover and uncover through their childhood games are amazingly inexplicable. The light humorous tone is a magnificent contrast as opposed to the gloomy secrets that lie withing the walls of the family residence. Roberts' novel is fascinating and absorbing. Immediately, "Daughters of the House" draws the reader in, and won't let go. It is an excellent story that surpasses many historical fiction novels.

A stunning book
Michele Roberts's 'Daughters of the House' is an eminently re-readable book, haunting and beautiful. Taking as its central conceit the sanitised figure of St. Therese, the novel examines the circumstances bringing her to this point, revealing a web of intrigue and betrayal.

One of Roberts's preoccupations in this novel is the nature of relationships between women, particularly as young girls fighting for both individuality and acceptance. Therese and her 'cousin' Leonie exist almost as the mirror of one another, bound together by their exclusion from family secrets.

The novel is beautifully written, but unobtrusively so; it is carefully constructed to portray a sense of the pre-linguistic state in which the girls exist. It's a truly extraordinary book that I've read at least half-a-dozen times, and will be reading again; every reading reveals another slant, just as Roberts looks beyond the saint to the woman.

The Virgin Mary haunts this book, suggesting the paradoxical nature of femininity that Leonie and Therese are expected to conform to; in this sense, Michele Roberts can be seen as a successor to Margaret Atwood and Sylvia Plath.

In short: this is a fantastic book, well worth putting time aside for, both to read it, and then simply to consider the points it raises. Wonderful, and highly recommended.