Guilty

by Anna Kavan

Overview

Peter Owen Publishers are proud to announce the publication of a previously unpublished novel.Set in an unspecified but eerily familiar time and landscape, Guilty is narrated by Mark. He begins the novel as a young boy whose father has just returned from war. In spite of being garlanded as a hero, Mark's father declares himself a pacifist and is immediately reviled in a country still suffering from the divisions of war. When his father is forced into exile Mark meets Mr Spector, a shady figure who from then on is a dominant force in Mark's life, seeing him through his schooling, employment and even finding him accommodation. When Mark tries to break off with Mr Spector in order to pursue an engagement with the beautiful but docile Carla his life begins to unravel. Thwarted at every turn by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy he begins to fall prey to the machinations and insecurities of his guilt-ridden mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780720614411
Publisher:	Owen, Peter Limited
Publication date:	05/01/2007
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Anna Kavan was one of the greatest unsung enigmas in 20th-century British literature. Born Helen Ferguson, a fraught childhood and two failed marriages led her to change her name to that of one of her characters. Despite struggling with mental illness and heroin addiction for most of her life, she was still able to write fiction that was as powerful and memorable as any English female writer of the last 150 years.

Editorial Reviews

British author Kavan (1901-1968) plays with the confusion of reality and unreality in this understated posthumous novel set in a nebulous time and place. When Mark, the somewhat unstable and unreliable narrator, is young, his war-hero father treasonously converts to pacifism and is forced to abandon him. Further isolated by a gradual separation and distancing from his mother, Mark is fully cast adrift by his parents' deaths, for which he blames himself, in an enemy bombing during his last year at boarding school. The similarities between Kavan's work (Ice) and Kafka's quickly become evident when Mark, now an adult, must contend with a hostile and unresponsive government bureaucracy. He's also torn between the powerful and mysterious Mr. Spector, whom he sees as both protector and nemesis, and the enigmatic love interest, Carla, who remains tantalizingly near but remote. Kavan's ability to penetrate psychological tangles with startling acuity is in full force in this powerful journey conducted by a very troubled mind. (Jan.)

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Publishers Weekly