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Book Cover for: The Looking Glass, Michèle Roberts

The Looking Glass

Michèle Roberts

An orphan enchanted by stories and the incantatory power of words, Genevieve lives an isolated existence as a maid to the widow Patin in a village cafe on the Normandy coast in the early 20th century. Forced to flee the village, she comes under the spell of a charismatic spinner of words, a poet who captivates every woman around him -- his mother, his mistress, his niece, his niece's governess, and eventually, his new maid, who soon begins to spin a story of her own.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Picador USA
  • Publish Date: Jun 1st, 2002
  • Pages: 304
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.46in - 5.66in - 0.76in - 0.90lb
  • EAN: 9780312420833
  • Categories: Historical - GeneralLiteraryWorld Literature - France - 21st Century

About the Author

Roberts, Michèle: - Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House, which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and, most recently, the highly-acclaimed Ignorance, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013. Her memoir Paper Houses was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud: Stories of Sex and Love. Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres.

Praise for this book

"To read The Looking Glass...is to experience a succession of pleasures." --The Washington Post Book World

"Erotic tension blooms in sensual prose....[Roberts] has a gift for making the ordinary extraordinary." --People

"[A] hypnotically sensuous new novel....[Its] assured, image-rich language...adds up to a palpable immediacy, an intimacy not usually associated with historical fiction." --Los Angeles Times

"The Looking Glass holds up a mirror to the dark sources of creativity at every stage of its carefully interlocked narrative....The gorgeous surfaces of the world, its earthy passions, lend the novel a sensual texture...that reflects desire, glimpsing the springs of creativity and the contours of a bygone age." --The New York Times Book Review