Great Granny Webster [Paperback]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

The real-life Guinness heiress offers an inside look at the lives of eccentric aristocrats in this “masterful . . . macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family portrait” (Literary Hub).

This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives.

Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood’s masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer.“The granny in question is unforgettable, presiding over an ancestral mansion with no heating and terrified butlers who wear boots inside because of the leaky roof that she’s too stingy to repair. The book is a sort of matricidal fantasia…” —Negar Azimi, The New Yorker

Narrated by an unnamed 14-year-old female, this masterful novella is equal parts macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family portrait. Without being overly self-conscious in its artlessness, it reads like the guileless confession of a simple innocent embroiled in a tangled net of ravaged and ruined lives. There’s a marvelous simplicity to the tale. —Lucy Scholes, Literary Hub

“Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood’s best book. In the monstrous old dowager of Hove, and the ruling clƒC