Keynote
“A magically beguiling work, a triumph of artistic vision.”—Financial Times (UK)
Book Title
Lanny
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
- Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize
Winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize
Body
There’s a village an hour from London. It’s no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land and to the land’s past.
It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical figure that schoolchildren used to draw as green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.
This chimerical, audacious, strange, and brilliant novel will enrapture readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Max Porter’s reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.
It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical figure that schoolchildren used to draw as green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.
This chimerical, audacious, strange, and brilliant novel will enrapture readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Max Porter’s reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.
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About the Author
Credit: Francesca Jones
Praise
- “Max Porter does damaged psyche well. . . . Porter’s winning new novel, Lanny, despair and unsettling entities are again on the menu, as are hard-won grace and beauty.”—The New York Times Book Review
- “A hybrid morality tale about environmental awareness, parenthood, and growing up, Lanny is enriched by its textures and stylized approach.”—The New Yorker
- “Porter’s innovative hybrid of fairy tale, fable, and myth cunningly evokes the freewheeling fantasies of children at play. . . . The result is a puckish celebration of imagination and free spirits rising above the buzz of societal scolds and the anxieties of parental love.”—NPR.org
- “Porter’s framework has enabled him to write a book that is part poetry and part prose, where each main character feels like a member of a chorus delivering a soliloquy, some humorous, many others pained.”—The Washington Post
