Susan Elderkin
(b.1968)Non fiction show
Books containing stories by Susan Elderkin
Awards
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Award nominations
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Susan Elderkin recommends
The Whalebone Theatre (2022)
Joanna Quinn
"Playful, inventive, sharp, funny, The Whalebone Theatre offers the sort of reading experience that is remarkably rare, even for those of us whose happiest hours are spent with books: sheer, undiluted delight from start to finish. Set in a big house on the Dorset coast and spanning the decades between the end of the first World War and the end of the second, it breathes fresh, bracing air into the lungs of the multi-generational saga--and the very form of the novel itself. Few people writing today can match Quinn for the energy and precision of her prose: sentences begin boldly, proceed to hit every nail on their path, then land, gorgeously, in a totally unexpected place. In Quinn's hands, archetypes are re-born: characters damaged by the usual unsavoury traditions of the British aristocracy are depicted with piercing efficiency, then found to be loveable despite it all. Catchphrases from the past are dug up, tossed wittily around, and suddenly understood for the very first time. Most importantly of all, perhaps, Quinn gives us Cristabel, the sort of intelligent heroine that has been sorely missing from every other classic since Middlemarch: disinterested in marriage yet capable of immense love. It's impossible not to be charmed by this book, its cast of characters, and Quinn's constantly striking prose. It is both reassuringly familiar, and startlingly new: a big fat Victorian novel written by someone from the post #metoo years."
A Net for Small Fishes (2021)
Lucy Jago
"Full of colour, intrigue, and historical characters we can relate to . . . Jago has a great flair for the sensuous image and evokes the heady mix of gaudy glamour and grime that characterises the era with a distinctive, dense poetry. Historical fiction at its scintillating best and most filmic."
