Author:Maria Edgeworth,Marilyn Butler,Marilyn Butler
Thady Quirk, devoted steward to the decaying estate of the Rackrent family, narrates a riotous story of four generations of a dying dynasty in Castle Rackrent (1800). Thady will defend his masters to the end, but eventually his naivety and blind loyalty cause him to ignore the warning signs as the family's excesses lead them to ruin. This volume also includes Ennui, the entertaining 'confessions' of the Earl of Glenthorn, a bored, spoiled aristocrat. Desperate to be free from 'the demon of ennui', Glenthorn's quest for happiness takes him through violence and revolution, and leads to intriguing twists of fate. Both novels offer a darkly comic and satirical exposé of the Irish class system, and a portrait of a nation in turmoil.
'No one ever forgets this book'
—— Independent'Her book is lifted...into the rare company of those that linger in the mind long after dramas, sagas and sophisticated frolics have coalesced into a blur of half-forgotten fiction'
—— Bookman'There is humour as well as tragedy in this book, besides its faint note of hope for human nature; and it is delightfully written in the now familiar Southern tradition'
—— Sunday TimesHarper Lee announced she would be releasing a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird this summer – 55 years after her debut. Go Set a Watchman, completed in the mid-50s but lost for more than half a century, was written before To Kill A Mockingbird and features Scout as an adult
—— GuardianNo one ever forgets this book
—— IndependentSomeone rare has written this very fine novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life and the warmest, most authentic humour. A touching book; and so funny, so likeable
—— Truman CapoteThere is humour as well as tragedy in this book, besides its faint note of hope for human nature; and it is delightfully written
—— Sunday Times