Publishers Weekly
★ 08/28/2023
Carey (Little) draws on fairy tales and Shakespeare for a dazzling bildungsroman. In 1901 Norwich, 12-year-old Edith Holler lives in her family’s dilapidated theater, where she fills her days reading books on the city’s past. From them she learns that hundreds of children have inexplicably died or vanished from Norwich over the centuries. She can’t say for sure, but she thinks they’ve been murdered, their bodies used to flavor Beetle Spread, a popular local delicacy invented by a 14th-century woman named Meg Uttig. Even the eccentric theatrical troupe that serves as Edith’s surrogate family would find her claim hard to swallow, so she decides to share her knowledge by writing a play, inspired by Hamlet, to reveal the crime through drama. In the run-up to its production, her father, Edgar, marries Margaret Uttig Unthank, the heir to the Beetle Spread fortune. Margaret promptly turns Edgar against Edith and burns all copies of her play. Edith, realizing Margaret will do anything to hide Beetle Spread’s secret, flees from the theater’s basement into subterranean Norwich, where she rewrites her play among the ghosts of the murdered children who roam the city’s bowels. Edith says her theatrical friends “strive to make the impossible possible” to “convince our public of fantastical personages and happenings.” On these grounds, Carey unquestionably succeeds. This affirms the author’s standing as a major literary talent. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Advance praise for Edith Holler:
“Edward Carey excels in writing – and drawing! – peculiar characters, and the cast he creates for the macabre and fun Edith Holler is no exception” —NPR
“A fabulous novel. . . . The voice of Edith Holler is distinctive and brilliant. . . . Edward Carey is a brilliant writer.” —Bill Goldstein, NBC New York
“Draws on fairy tales and Shakespeare for a dazzling bildungsroman. . . . [and] unquestionably succeeds. This affirms [Edward Carey’s] standing as a major literary talent.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)
“In ways both witty and dark, the novel brilliantly probes the distinction between drama and real life, audience and performer, actor and character. And the whimsical illustrations, all drawn by Carey himself, are the perfect accompaniment to a story about an art form as visual as it is verbal. A wonderfully strange and quirky tale about the power of penning and performing tales.” —Kirkus
“Edith Holler is a masterpiece. Carey’s prose teems with wonderfully twisted humor and play, breathing life into the spirits that haunt its gothic framework. It is that special novel that makes you wonder why there aren’t more like it. The answer, of course, is that there is just one Edward Carey. Edith Holler is singular—a dark delight from beginning to end.” —Erika Swyler, bestselling author of The Book of Speculation and Light from Other Stars
“Edith Holler is that rarest thing, a newly written tale that feels as though it's been discovered behind the stacked stone walls of an abandoned estate. It’s eldritch, raucous, blistering, beautiful, and totally indelible.” —Maria Dahvana Headley, New York Times bestselling author of The Mere Wife
“Brilliant and shiver-inducing, Edith Holler is a delightfully macabre achievement, equal parts Charles Dickens and Sweeney Todd. Through Edith’s keen eyes we come to know her family theatre and its many denizens—each a masterpiece of oddity—as well as the frightening newcomer who threatens to topple her very world. A bravura performance.” —Helene Wecker, New York Times bestselling author of The Golem and the Jinni
“At once delightful and uncanny, familiar and utterly unique, Edith Holler is a triumph from the first page to the last. A master class on how the unbelievable can illustrate unsettling truths about our own world. Brilliant, propulsively readable, and above all, impossible to forget.” —Molly Greeley, author of Marvelous and The Heiress
“A raucous romp through the world of early 20th-century theater . . . In ways both witty and dark, the novel brilliantly probes the distinction between drama and real life, audience and performer, actor and character. And the whimsical illustrations, all drawn by Carey himself, are the perfect accompaniment to a story about an art form as visual as it is verbal. A wonderfully strange and quirky tale about the power of penning and performing tales.” —Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Little:
“[An] incredible book.” —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
“[A] marvelous, weird, and vividly imagined new novel. . . A fantastic winter tale, a big, patient read full of reversals of fortune and fabulous glimpses of a time not unlike our own when a new technology of likeness brought the giants of media and politics closer than ever. . . . Carey has woven a beautiful parable about the power of that proximity.” —John Freeman, Boston Globe
“Marie’s story . . . is a fascinating thing in itself. But Carey’s talent makes her journey a thing of wonder.” —Danielle Trussoni, New York Times Book Review
“An unmissable book.” —Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Nobel Prize
“I marvel at the achievement of this book. . . . It's about humans, and bodies, and art, and loneliness. . . . I could talk about it forever.” —NPR
“A dazzlingly detailed portrait of Paris on the brink of revolution . . . Reminiscent of Dickens, Defoe and Fielding, Little speaks eloquently of the pleasures and perils of art, commerce and identity.” —San Francisco Chronicle
Praise for The Swallowed Man:
“Inspired . . . a riff on the entwined themes of fatherhood and creative spark.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A strange and tender parable . . . All of Edward Carey's work is profound and delightful.” —Max Porter, author of Lanny
“The Swallowed Man stands out among Carey’s other works. . . . an existential fairy tale for adults told by an old artist considering the tragedy of life.” —The Washington Post
“Richly descriptive and abundantly playful . . . [an] endearing meditation on creation and its power, conveying how much the act adds to our existence.” —The Austin Chronicle
“Geppeto, carver of naughty Pinocchio, keeps a haunting journal of his years inside the whale. Bizarre [and] moving.” —Margaret Atwood
“Illuminated by Carey’s exquisitely textured original illustrations. . . . [It has] the feeling of a book that both exists outside of time and yet lands, unerringly, in the present. . . . And as deliberate as his brushstrokes are, his words are as well.”
—Alexander Chee, Lit Hub
Kirkus Reviews
2023-08-12
A comic novel (tinged with gothic elements) about a girl trapped in her family’s theater in Norwich, England in 1901.
When Edith Holler—the precocious 12-year-old narrator of this twisty tale—was christened, an old actress put a curse on her: If the girl ever stepped outside, she would die and the “entire theatre would come tumbling down.” Afterward, the story goes, the actress exploded, spattering blood everywhere. But is the story real? “We who live in the theatre here have some belief in magical things,” Edith tells us. Both imprisoned and perfectly content, Edith roams the nooks and crannies of the theater, and when she tires of this, she reads about the town’s history and makes a disturbing discovery: The children of Norwich have been disappearing in astonishing numbers. Moreover, she has a pretty good hunch who’s responsible: folk legend Mawther Meg, the woman who allegedly invented Utting’s Beetle Spread, a local delicacy. Since no one takes her seriously, Edith pursues the only avenue open to a child forbidden by her father from speaking to outsiders: She writes a play. This, in turn, sets into motion an uncanny sequence of events that seems to come straight from her script and gives credence to her father’s warning that once a play is out in the world, its characters come to life. Though Carey’s book runs a wee bit long, it is a raucous romp through the world of early 20th-century theater, with its barrels of fake blood and donkeys living in the bowels of the understage to provide the muscle for scene changes. In ways both witty and dark, the novel brilliantly probes the distinction between drama and real life, audience and performer, actor and character. And the whimsical illustrations, all drawn by Carey himself, are the perfect accompaniment to a story about an art form as visual as it is verbal.
A wonderfully strange and quirky tale about the power of penning and performing tales.
