Secrets and lies linger in the very walls of the solid old Normandy house where Therèse and Leonie, French and English cousins, grow up after the war. Intrigued by adults' guilty silences and the broken shrine they find in the woods, the girls weave their own fantasies, unwittingly revealing the village's buried shame, a shame that will haunt them both for the rest of their lives.
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Remarkable and beautifully written (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY )
A brave and richly imagined novel, full of thrilling set pieces. The new prestige it seems likely to earn for one of our best writers is long overdue. (GUARDIAN )
Subtle and persuasive (COSMOPOLITAN )
An intense piece of writing, in which the transfigured mundane world of recipes, parental prohibitions and almost ritualised gossip is posed against official purity and religiosity, and shown to be superior. (TLS )
A brave and richly imagined novel, full of thrilling set pieces. The new prestige it seems likely to earn for one of our best writers is long overdue. (GUARDIAN )
Subtle and persuasive (COSMOPOLITAN )
An intense piece of writing, in which the transfigured mundane world of recipes, parental prohibitions and almost ritualised gossip is posed against official purity and religiosity, and shown to be superior. (TLS )
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Utterly beguiling' Joanna Trollope
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
By JOHN
Format:Paperback
Given its French setting, I would immediately recommend this exquisitely written novel to anyone who has marvelled over the consummate skill behind Monet’s Impressionist paintings of Rouen Cathedral: indistinct blurs which come into focus when you step away from them. And, in a literary context, one of those novels about a difficult and ambiguous past, where the reader reconstructs that past along with the main characters.
Considering that so little is explicitly said, the summer spent by two adolescent girls in post-Second World War France is vividly rendered. The allusive titles of the chapters - “The Frying-Pan”, “The Oranges”, “The Ironing-Board” - are an important clue to the oppressively domestic setting, but also to the way in which deep and disturbing truths lie behind apparently ordinary objects. And the same is true of words. “Her words shot out in a clatter”, reads one sentence about half-way through the narrative. And, throughout the novel, words do indeed clatter, and resound and reverberate, echoing and amplifying earlier words, combining to show how deep and unpleasant truths are to be found beneath platitudinous surfaces.
The veneer of civilised behaviour is always thin and precarious in Michèle Roberts’s novel. And there are dark forests and dark cellars to mirror the dark secrets the novel gradually unfolds. The whole novel is a dark diamond, and one which demands to be contemplated more than once.
Considering that so little is explicitly said, the summer spent by two adolescent girls in post-Second World War France is vividly rendered. The allusive titles of the chapters - “The Frying-Pan”, “The Oranges”, “The Ironing-Board” - are an important clue to the oppressively domestic setting, but also to the way in which deep and disturbing truths lie behind apparently ordinary objects. And the same is true of words. “Her words shot out in a clatter”, reads one sentence about half-way through the narrative. And, throughout the novel, words do indeed clatter, and resound and reverberate, echoing and amplifying earlier words, combining to show how deep and unpleasant truths are to be found beneath platitudinous surfaces.
The veneer of civilised behaviour is always thin and precarious in Michèle Roberts’s novel. And there are dark forests and dark cellars to mirror the dark secrets the novel gradually unfolds. The whole novel is a dark diamond, and one which demands to be contemplated more than once.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
"Daughters of the House, by Michele Roberts, is an outstanding novel. Roberts retells the story of St. Therese of Lisieux with a new twist. It is a historical fiction set in the 1950's, about Therese's life before she enters the convent. It is littered with little details to make the story more interesting and believable. Her way of describing things is so simple, that it incorporates the reader into the story. The characters, too, are believable and likeable. "Daughters of the House" gives a glimpse of what life was like for Leonie and Therese in France. The secrets they discover and uncover through their childhood games are amazingly inexplicable. The light humorous tone is a magnificent contrast as opposed to the gloomy secrets that lie withing the walls of the family residence. Roberts' novel is fascinating and absorbing. Immediately, "Daughters of the House" draws the reader in, and won't let go. It is an excellent story that surpasses many historical fiction novels.
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Michele Roberts's 'Daughters of the House' is an eminently re-readable book, haunting and beautiful. Taking as its central conceit the sanitised figure of St. Therese, the novel examines the circumstances bringing her to this point, revealing a web of intrigue and betrayal.
One of Roberts's preoccupations in this novel is the nature of relationships between women, particularly as young girls fighting for both individuality and acceptance. Therese and her 'cousin' Leonie exist almost as the mirror of one another, bound together by their exclusion from family secrets.
The novel is beautifully written, but unobtrusively so; it is carefully constructed to portray a sense of the pre-linguistic state in which the girls exist. It's a truly extraordinary book that I've read at least half-a-dozen times, and will be reading again; every reading reveals another slant, just as Roberts looks beyond the saint to the woman.
The Virgin Mary haunts this book, suggesting the paradoxical nature of femininity that Leonie and Therese are expected to conform to; in this sense, Michele Roberts can be seen as a successor to Margaret Atwood and Sylvia Plath.
In short: this is a fantastic book, well worth putting time aside for, both to read it, and then simply to consider the points it raises. Wonderful, and highly recommended.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beguiling
I would never have chosen this book for myself. I read it as part of the required reading for my degree, and after the first thirty pages, I abandoned it, bored. Read more
Published 13 days ago by Nichola Thorpe
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful and Memorable
The book that really made Michele Robert famous: a lyrical, exquisitely written tale of family tensions in a Normandy village, of the dark legacy of World War II, and of cousin -... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Kate Hopkins
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bigger than the Blurb
This book divulges into the lives of two cousins who have both been brought up in two very different cultures. Read more
Published on 7 Jan 2010 by HANNAH ROWLEY
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointed
Oh dear this was a book I struggled to want to carry on with. Only because of seing rave reviews did I carry on expecting to be hooked but sadly wasn't. Read more
Published on 21 Dec 2009 by BeeReader
2.0 out of 5 stars
HHHmmmmm
I came on here and read the reviews for this book and thought oh this is going to be good even though one person had disagreed and I now have to agree with them. Read more
Published on 4 July 2008 by Ms. B. H. Howe
3.0 out of 5 stars
'Nice' but is that enough?
I'm afraid I disagree [...].
It certainly is a nice book to read but I found myself having to really get involved with the characters in order to actually become... Read more
It certainly is a nice book to read but I found myself having to really get involved with the characters in order to actually become... Read more
Published on 2 April 2007 by SJSmith
5.0 out of 5 stars
A chance to intimately relate with a great writers' creativity and...
One of my favourite authors who has inspired me in so many ways. I was fortunate enough to meet her on the Greek island of Skyros on one of her "Writers Lab" workshops during 2006. Read more
Published on 3 Jan 2007 by J. Cooper
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