The Vet's Daughter [Paperback]

The Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife's death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own.

Harrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King, The Vet's Daughter is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.“Comyns's world is weird and wonderful. Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I'd go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.” —Lucy Scholes, The Guardian

“Comyns has a pictorial eye, and though she wrote stories from a young age, she originally thought of herself as a sculptor and painter...[her] wild but exact style is always instantly recognizable, a mix of looseness and compression.” —Jé Wilson, The New York Review of Books


I’d like also to recommend The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns, which hit me like a dangerous drug earlier this year: one of the best books I’ve ever read. --Wesley Stace, The BelieverBarbara Comyns (1909–1992) was born in Bidford-on-Avon, in the English county of Warwickshire, one of six children of an increasingly unsuccessful Birmingham brewer. Living on the run-down but romantic family estate and receiving her education from governesses, she began to write and illustrate stories at the age of ten. After her father’s death, she attended l³2