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Lost & Found

adult book group

Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood

Mark your calendar for the Lost & Found discussion of Caroline Blackwood's shockingly funny "Great Granny Webster" on 29 July 2021. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer. This macabre, mordantly funny, partly autobiographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives. It is Blackwood's masterpiece and another novel to add to that strange pantheon of short works that pack an enormous literary wallop! Poet Philip Larkin said about it, "None of us will ever forget Caroline Blackwood's "Great Granny Webster", a matter-of-fact account  - and all the grimmer for this matter-of-factness - of the temperamental and circumstantial misfortunes of the Ulster family. Although it's deceptively concise, it evokes the spirit of no less than four ages: Victorian, Edwardian, pre- and postwar, in exact, resonant prose...A uniquely literary experience." Feel free to enjoy an adult beverage during the discussion. We look forward to seeing you!

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