Dinah Brooke

From the “brilliant forgotten novelist” behind the “ferocious” Lord Jim at Home (The Telegraph) comes a searing tale of a young woman’s unravelling beneath the unforgiving Tuscan sun. Miranda, her husband Louis, and their infant daughter are set to spend the summer in a rented villa in Tuscany. He’s a self-assured young American actor; she, a well-educated, well-bred English ingénue. But when Louis is called away to a shoot, Miranda is left alone with her baby in the remote Italian countryside—until a young Italian named Oreste arrives, claiming to have been invited by her now-absent husband. Miranda quickly falls under the interloper’s spell—and into his arms—launching into a feverish affair that threatens to dissolve her already fragile, fracturing sense of self. As events spiral further out of her control, the novel hurtles headlong toward its horrifying conclusion. Written in the same “limpid, assured style: cruel, yes, but not detached or apathetic” (Harper’s Magazine) as Lord Jim at Home, Dinah Brooke’s transgressive debut remains every bit as shocking as when it was first published in 1971.

"A ferocious comedy of middle-class dysfunction . . . published to controversy in 1973 . . . A masterpiece." --Claire Allfree, The Telegraph When Dinah pooke's second novel, Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as "squalid and startling," "nastily horrific," and a "monstrous parody" of upper-middle class English life. It is the story of Giles Trenchard, who grows up isolated in an atmosphere of privilege and hidden violence; who goes to war, and returns; and then, one day--like the hero of Joseph Conrad's classic Lord Jim--commits an act that calls his past, his character, his whole world into question. Out of print for nearly half a century (and never published in the United States), Lord Jim at Home reveals a daring writer long overdue for reappraisal, whose work has retained all its originality and power. As Ottessa Moshfegh writes in her foreword to this new edition, pooke evokes childhood vulnerability and adult cruelty "in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand."