This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime, but millions of other items are. Join
Amazon Prime today. Already a member?
Sign in.
Product Description
Synopsis
What is the secret surrounding the birth of Imelda's child? This dark novella presents us with two contradictory accounts of events which lead to madness and death for the scions of a genteel Border family. The reader is invited to decide which testimony, if either, is to be relied upon. The short stories show superably the familiar Herdman preoccupations: reckless and unreliable narrators, states of mind bordering on the insane, and partially submerged complexes which erupt into the normal circumstances of life with surreal and unforgettable results.
About the Author
John Herdman was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1941, went to school there and to university at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he graduated with 1st Class Honours in English and later received his Ph.D. John Herdman is a novelist, short story writer, playwright and critic and has published 13 books. He has had two plays successfully produced on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, in 1985 and 1997. He has received Scottish Arts Council Awards for his novels Pagan's Pilgrimage and Imelda, and three Scottish Arts Council Bursaries. His work is currently being taught at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and the University of Voronezh, Russia. Herdman's principle books of fiction are the early novellas and stories now collected in Four Tales; Imelda and Other Stories; and Ghostwriting. He has been described as "a worthy successor to James Hogg and R L Stevenson" within the field of Scottish fiction, but his main affinities are perhaps with European writers of the nineteenth century and with the Irish and European modernists. His fictions have a metaphysical flavour and are salted with liberal dashes of the satirical and the grotesque. He has a particular obsession with the theme of duality and has published a critical study of the motif of the Double in nineteenth century fiction. He has also written a pioneering study of the lyrics of Bob Dylan, Voice Without Restraint, and to demonstrate his eclecticism has edited two volumes of The Third Statistical Account of Scotland. John Herdman is divorced and lives in Highland Perthshire.
