ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | Havisham

Havisham

 

IN THE TRADITION OF WIDE SARGASSO SEAHAVISHAM IS THE ASTONISHING PRELUDE TO CHARLES DICKENS’S GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

Before she became the immortal and haunting Miss Havisham of Great Expectations, she was Catherine, a young woman with all of her dreams ahead of her. Spry, imperious, she is the daughter of a wealthy brewer. But she is never far from the smell of hops and the arresting letters on the brewhouse wall—HAVISHAM—a reminder of all she owes to the family name and the family business.

Sent by her father to stay with the Chadwycks, Catherine discovers elegant pastimes to remove the taint of her family’s new money. But for all her growing sophistication, Catherine is anything but worldly, and when a charismatic stranger pays her attention, everything—her heart, her future, the very Havisham name—is vulnerable.

In Havisham, Ronald Frame unfurls the psychological trauma that made young Catherine into Miss Havisham and cursed her to a life alone, roaming the halls of the mansion in the tatters of the dress she wore for the wedding she was never to have.

Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013 

“In Havisham, his prequel to Great Expectations, Ronald Frame colorfully imagines the traumas that doomed the tortured Miss Havisham.”—Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair’s Hot Type

“Delicate and closely observed….Frame has a nice feel for the epiphanic shudders of a young woman’s heart and a watercolorist’s eye for English landscapes….What a lark. What a plunge.”—Louis Bayard, The Washington Post

Picador
Publication Date: November 5, 2013
pages: 368
trim: 9.4 x 6 inches
price (Hardcover): $26.00
ISBN (Hardcover): 1250037271


Ronald Frame was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and educated there and at Oxford University. His novel The Lantern Bearers was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, named the Scottish Book of the Year, and cited by the American Library Association. He is also a dramatist and winner of the Samuel Beckett Award. Many of his original radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC. He lives outside Glasgow.


 

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Eckleburg is a print and online literary journal that offers original fiction, poetry, essays, music, art, writing workshops and more.