Angelica
Arthur Phillips
'Angelica impresses first as a clever send-up of the late Victorian novel, and then becomes its own very original thing. It is engrossing, deeply moving, and — precisely because it is moving — very frightening.'
Stephen King'Phillips's spellbinding third book cements this young novelist's reputation as one of the best writers in America, a storyteller who combines Nabokovian wit and subtlety with a narrative urgency that rivals Stephen King's... The novel thus unfolds like some infernally complex piece of origami... [A] profoundly unsettling achievement.'
(The Washington Post (Best Fiction of 2007 List))'A spectacular, ever-proliferating tale of mingled motives, psychological menace, and delicately told crises of appetite and loneliness.'
(The New Yorker)From the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague comes an equally accomplished and entirely surprising novel. Angelica is a spellbinding Victorian ghost story, an intriguing literary and psychological puzzle, and a meditation on marriage, childhood, memory, and fear.
The novel opens in London, in the 1880s, when the Barton household is on the brink of collapse. Mother, father, and daughter provoke each other, consciously and unconsciously, and a horrifying crisis is triggered. As the family’s tragedy is told several times from different perspectives, events are recast, and sympathies shift; nothing is at it seems. These differing accounts appear to contradict each other, but each one casts new light — and new shadows — on the others, and on the desires and fears that drive these vivid characters.
In the dark of night, a chilling sexual spectre is making its way through the house, hovering over the sleeping girl and terrorising her fragile mother. Are these visions real, or is there something more sinister, and more human, to fear? A spiritualist is summoned to cleanse the place of its terrors, but with her arrival the complexities of motive and desire only multiply. By day, the mother’s failing health and the father’s many secrets fuel the growing conflicts, while the daughter — innocent and vulnerable, or precocious and manipulative — flirts dangerously with truth and fantasy.
Reminiscent of classic horror tales such as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House, Angelica is also a thoroughly modern exploration of identity, reality, and love. As in Phillips’s previous works, the reader is an active participant, challenged to untangle the truth of of this dire mystery. Angelica ultimately is an investigation of how people try to explain themselves to the world and the world to themselves.
In this mesmerizing and provocative novel, acclaimed author Arthur Phillips examines the intersection of haunting and psychology, where fears can give birth to the very specters that inspire them. Set at the dawn of psychoanalysis and the peak of spiritualism’s acceptance, Angelica is also an evocative historical novel that explores the timeless human thirst for certainty.
'A charming novel in which old-fashioned phantoms cleverly give way to Freudian nightmares.'
(The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice))'A culturally authentic masterpiece... Angelica is bold and clever, its setting rich and provocative. Its unsettling story line unearths deep wells of intense human trauma and deception.'
(USA Today)'Arthur Phillips is one brainy, clever, talented writer... Phillips masters the alternately delicate and overwrought language and conventions of Victorian ghost stories ... raises far-reaching questions about the elusiveness of cause and effect and, especially, certainty.'
(The Boston Globe)'A symphony of psychological complexity and misdirection in four increasingly tricky movements displays the varied wares of the gifted Phillips.... Phillips juggles possibilities almost as adroitly as did Henry James in this novel's likely inspiration, The Turn of the Screw – and he ups the ante in successive narratives... Elegant writing abounds, as do probing characterizations and flashes of wit... An impressive step forward for the versatile Phillips, who continues to engage, surprise, and entertain.'
(Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review))'Phillips’s impressive third novel uses four linked viewpoints to explore class, gender, family dynamics, sexuality and sciences... Captures period diction and detail brilliantly. At its strongest, the multiple-viewpoint narration yields psychological depth and a number of clever surprises.'
(Publishers Weekly)'Angelica turns unreliability into a burning existential, psychological question and an essential condition of the world as we know it... Phillips has pulled off an impressive pastiche of the Jamesian aesthetic without sinking into sheer imitation... Angelica is a psychological detective story without the detective... It is left to the reader to fire up their inner Sherlock Holmes and piece together the remains of these shattered Victorian lives into a coherent tale. Phillips may not supply the answers, but he has crafted some elegant shards.'
(San Francisco Chronicle)Arthur Phillips
Author photo
Anna Weise
Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis in 1969 and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. His first novel, Prague, a US bestseller, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and received The Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His subsequent novels, The Egyptologist and Angelica, were both bestsellers and have been translated into twenty-five languages. His most recent book is The Song Is You. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.
Website: http://www.arthurphillips.info/
Extent: 352pp
Size: 210mm x 135mm
RRP: $29.95
Pub date: March 2011
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