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The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville - £12.99  Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (1998)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780747535140 | ISBN 10: 0747535140

Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 1997.
Orange Prize Shortlist 1998.
 
With relish and consumate skill, Pauline Melville conjures vivid pictures of both savannah, forest and city life in South America, where love is often trumped by desire.
 
Unforgettable characters illuminate theme and plot: Sonny, the strange, beautiful and isolate son of Beatrice and Danny, the brother and sister who have a passionate affair at the time of the solar eclipse in 1919; Father Napier, the sandy-haired evangelist whom the Indians perceive as a giant grasshopper; Chofy McKinnon the modern Indian, torn between savannah life and urban future; Rosa, his English lover.
 
This is a novel which embraces nearly a century, large in scope but intimate as a whisper, where laughter is never far from the scene of tragedy; a parable of miscegenation and racial exclusiveness, of nature defying culture, magic confronting rationalism and of the eternally rebellious nature of love.

(Price & availability last checked: October 2018)

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The Ventriloquist's Tale

by Pauline Melville

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