Author of the Month: Barbara Comyns
Selected by the Bookshop
Our Author of the Month for June is the British novelist Barbara Comyns.
After a dysfunctional childhood – ‘she was lucky to get out of it alive,’ Rosemary Hill wrote in the LRB – Comyns earned a precarious living by modelling, converting houses into apartments, breeding poodles, renovating pianos, dealing in antique furniture and classic cars and drawing for commercial advertisements. Comyns’s novels, beginning with Sisters by a River in 1947, draw on both her childhood and an early adulthood that veered between rural poverty, Bohemian London and the fringes of the criminal underworld. Writing about The Vet’s Daughter, Graham Greene praised her ‘strange offbeat talent … and that innocent eye which observes with childlike simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrence’.
Start with Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and its unforgettable heroine Sophia, and take a look at the full list of her titles here to experience the full range of her eccentric, inimitable genius.
From the publisher:
‘Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful . . . a neglected genius’ LUCY SCHOLES, OBSERVER‘A curious hybrid: a mixture of domestic disaster, social commentary, comedy, and romance . . . ‘ KATHERINE A.…
From the publisher:
‘Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius’ LUCY SCHOLES, GUARDIAN‘It is hard not to believe that Barbara Comyns’s own adventures are…
From the publisher:
INTRODUCED BY JANE GARDAM'A small Gothic masterpiece . . . I have read it many times, and with every re-read I marvel again at its many qualities - its darkness, its strangeness, its humour, its sadness, its startling images and twists of…
From the publisher:
That evening the baker’s wife ran down the village street in a tattered pink nightgown. She screamed as she ran.Strange things are afoot in the English village where the Willoweed family live. First, the river floods in June. The…
From the publisher:
Caroline and her young daughter have been abandoned, World War II has begun and Mr Fox offers them his help. Mr Fox is a spiv, a dealer in black-market food, but he can provide a roof over their heads, advice on bending the law and escaping…
From the publisher:
Bella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whose name she didn’t quite catch, and her once pretty face is disfigured by the scar she acquired in a car accident. Friendless and without…
From the publisher:
The morning I left home Mother was recovering from being poorly and she’d been sick in the vegetable basket.Sisters Victoria and Blanche grow up in their grandfather’s house in Warwickshire. It’s a secluded existence:…
From the publisher:
Evelyn and Berti are divorcees, addicted to tight trousers and drink, surviving on small annuities and they do not get on well together.Though well past their prime, there is an air of breeding about them but something distinctly odd too.…
From the publisher:
The extraordinary twentieth-century writer Barbara Comyns led a life as captivating as the narratives she spun. This pioneering biography reveals the journey of a woman who experienced hardship and single-motherhood before the age of thirty…
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