Lanny: A Novel [Paperback]

Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize

An entrancing new novel by the author of the prizewinningGrief Is the Thing with Feathers

Theres a village an hour from London. Its no different from many others today: one pub, one church, redbrick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land and to the lands past.

It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a mythical figure local schoolchildren used to draw as green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, ethereal boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

WithLanny, Max Porter extends the potent and magical space he created inGrief Is the Thing with Feathers. This brilliant novel will ensorcell readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama.Lannyis a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Porters reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.

Max Porter does damaged psyche well. . . . In Porters winning new novel,Lanny, despair and unsettling entities are again on the menu, as are hard-won grace and beauty.The New York Til³,