What do you do when the unthinkable happens?
Little Monsters
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Review
'Beautifully written and crafted, and more compelling than many thrillers' -- Daily Mail
'Charles Lambert's Little Monsters is a first novel which is more than just a `promising debut'.' -- Literary blogger, John Self
'The parts of the book dealing with Carol's adolescence are very good indeed.'
-- Guardian
'This is the story of a young girl ripped apart by grief...finding the stability she craves in her Uncle Joey' -- Good Housekeeping
'an accomplished coming-of-age novel...Little Monsters is a deceptively simple tale, beatifully told.' -- Me and My Big Mouth --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
'Charles Lambert's Little Monsters is a first novel which is more than just a `promising debut'.' -- Literary blogger, John Self
'The parts of the book dealing with Carol's adolescence are very good indeed.'
-- Guardian
'This is the story of a young girl ripped apart by grief...finding the stability she craves in her Uncle Joey' -- Good Housekeeping
'an accomplished coming-of-age novel...Little Monsters is a deceptively simple tale, beatifully told.' -- Me and My Big Mouth --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
When I was thirteen, my father killed my mother . . . How do you recover from something like that? Carol never quite does. Sent to live with her aunt, who barely tolerates her presence, Carol is grief-stricken and desperate for love. Her Uncle Joey is the only one to notice her; years later, he's also the man with whom she builds a home and a life. But when Carol helps to rescue a young refugee from the sea, that life threatens to unravel, just as surely as it did when she was thirteen. 'Charles Lambert is a seriously good writer' Beryl Bainbridge 'With exquisitely tender writing and quiet authority, Little Monsters is a powerful debut' Jill Dawson 'As memorable first lines go, this is right up there with the best of them, and the rest of Charles Lambert's debut novel doesn't fail to live up to that promising beginning . . . Beautifully written and crafted, and more compelling than many thrillers, Lambert's book puts the reader right in the head of a teenage girl; quite an achievement for a 53-year-old man' Daily Mail
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By NN Foster
Format:Hardcover
Little Monsters starts off with a tremendous bang, grabbing the reader's attention with its first sentence, and then manages somehow to maintain that effect on pretty much every page thereafter. The novel is written very economically, yet the author, nonetheless, seems to say everything that needs saying. I particularly admired the practiced and stylish way he weaves the time strands together (can this really be his first novel?) so that the story conveys the crippling effect of confused and uncertain memories on the lives of the main characters without the story itself becoming in any way confusing or unnecessarily difficult for the reader. There were too many individual passages that I particularly admired for me to list them all, but examples (in random order) are Jozef's life installation, which becomes gradually more opaque as it becomes crowded with life's experiences - I suppose you can only say you know yourself when you don't actually know very much at all; the evocation of the 1960's pub where much of the novel dealing with the life of the young Carol is set; the idea that art is there to ask questions about life and not simply to provide answers, and the way this ties in with Flavio's remark to Carol that life is black and white only for the young, those who haven't yet had time to accumulate much detail in their experience of life (this may sound very old and jaundiced to all you youngsters out there, but don't let that put you off reading the novel). Little Monsters is a book I would recommend to anyone, and I'm already looking forward to reading the next product of Charles Lambert's pen.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This beautifully written novel grabs the reader by the throat on the first page and does not let go. An enthralling storyline, evocative sense of place, characters that are fully rounded and real. This is a very impressive debut. I look forward to Charles Lambert's next work!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A quietly fantastic novel. I found it, first, so surprising: characters, story, moral direction, delicacy of insight into alterity, and all the forms of immigration and exile, emotional (including that of near-orphancy), political, geographical -- all manage to avoid the obvious, or even expected, though the plot twists were always cohesive and never cheap. I found the young anti-heroine strange and strangely challenging, she and Joe beautiful fleshings out of near-absolute good (there are aspects of a more articulate Jo in Great Expectations, or gauche, good Russian heroes) and something approaching evil (like Kevin in Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin'). The small girl's status unsettled me: she challenges a few post-globalised reactions, including the evilly ready-made judgments in us of aspects of immigration which test our views of the need to share our world. I liked her struggle out of the water onto the beach, like the first amphibian, a life force that has to be found a place. Jo I just loved. There's also a good dog (as it were), and I always respect people who can write animals convincingly into novels. This one is a sort of objective correlative, or perhaps just test, for a nucleus of characters, a couple of encounters coming near real horror (`Kevin' again). I generally pounce on `I live abroad you know' novels, but though the author and I clearly share a similar situation, I found no irritating, insider, I-live-there nudging, and loved how the Chinese boxes of the different characters' migrating always left the view slightly skewed, requiring the reader to do some work and decision-making of her own. Again, nothing obvious in a context screaming out for it. My only mild dissent is with the opening sentence, which momentarily seems to set a tone the rest of the novel rightly (I think) refuses to follow. But that's a minor niggle indeed. It was wonderful.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
"I have got a girlfriend now, her name is Maudie..."
Little Monsters is a story of childhood suspended, for both Carol, whose father has killed her mother, and for Kakuna - named for a Pokemon figure - a refugee of uncertain age. Read more
Published on 31 Mar 2011 by Eileen Shaw
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting Dual Time Narrative
With the attention-grabbing first line; "When I was thirteen, my father killed my mother" this story soon had me racing through the pages, wondering just how 13 year old Carol ends... Read more
Published on 1 Sep 2010 by Lincs Reader
5.0 out of 5 stars
A tour-de-force
This novel is a study of damaged people, but also touches on the possibilities of human renewal in the face of what used to be called man's inhumanity to man. Read more
Published on 2 Nov 2009 by Rob Spence
2.0 out of 5 stars
What would make this a better book
Lambert offers first chapter lines that attract attention but the story as a whole lacks clarity, cohesion and purpose. Read more
Published on 28 Oct 2009 by Reader
2.0 out of 5 stars
I don't quite get it...
Something just isn't quite right with this novel. It almost works - but not quite. I'm not sure what the intention was - as none of the storylines reach a complete arc, one could... Read more
Published on 17 Jun 2009 by Kelly A19
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great 'cuddle up in bed with a good book' book
I didn't feel too emotional about this novel the way I can with others, but I found it oddly calming and pleasant to read. Read more
Published on 14 Jan 2009 by serialdeviant
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enthralling first novel
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and read it in one sitting. It was very unusual and I would recommend wholeheartedly. Read more
Published on 10 Aug 2008 by Dewar
5.0 out of 5 stars
Charles Lambert is a born writer
The landscape of this gripping first novel couldn't be more pertinent: its characters hail from England, Italy, Albania, Poland, in short from the globalized world of today. Read more
Published on 18 April 2008 by Innocent Abroad
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Work of Feeling
The novel's emotional insights are of a quality and precision which often took me aback; no character, however monstrous he or she may appear, stays untouched by the author's... Read more
Published on 2 April 2008 by John Wilkinson
4.0 out of 5 stars
Better than 'A Good Read'!
I found it all so believable, and so full of questions, many of which (delightfully) are never answered, just like Life...And the style is marvellously confident and rich. Read more
Published on 26 Mar 2008 by Ann Winchester
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