In a Dark Wood (Paperback)

In A Dark Wood unravels through a matrix of fairy tales and half-forgotten memories leading from London in the 1960s to present-day New York and the white verandaed houses of North Carolina (hemmed in, of course, by dark woods). It's Amanda Craig's fourth novel, following the acclaimed A Vicious Circle, which is currently being developed for BBC television. Craig confirms with this novel that she is a voice to listen to, a bold writer who is not frightened to deliver a harrowing read. That said, In A Dark Wood has a lighter side and is shot through with a magical feel--as all good fairy tales should be.--Jane Honey --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
''A book within a book, a rich plot with plenty of on-the-edge-of-your-seat suspense, an abundance of quirky but believable characters, a dual-location setting and even an unexpected twist at the end...an elegant anti-fairy tale for adults.' Daily Express 'An eerie novel full of fairy-tale menace beguilingly told and hypnotic.' Independent on Sunday

With a marriage in ruins and two small children literally driving him mad, Benedick Hunter (the unemployed actor at the heart of Craig's compelling fourth novel) embarks on a quest to learn more about his mother, Laura, an American-born children's illustrator who committed suicide 35 years earlier. Spurred on by clues that Laura's work mirrors her life, Benedick visits former colleagues and neighbours of his parents; then, with his son in tow, he flies to New York and on to North Carolina, where a threatening landscape of dense woods and alligators seems eerily familiar. While this is in itself an engaging narrative, Craig's real achievement is the skill with which she enters Benedick's head to anatomize the phases of his nervous breakdown. The reader follows his progress - from his painfully funny outburst at an audition to extraordinary spending-sprees in New York and Charleston - without the experience ever seeming merely voyeuristic. Retaining sympathy for Benedick even when he is at his most unreasonable, she demonstrates that the worlds of the child and the manic depressive are both touchingly and comically close. Fittingly, perhaps, and in the manner of the coded fairy-stories that pepper the novel, the fictional details of Laura Hunter's biography resemble that of a real-life enigma, Sylvia Plath. An American who ended her life in Primrose Hill in the 1960s, she polarized opinion among those left behind, and her death followed her husband's departure with another woman. This strategy is characteristic of a mordant humour that finds Ayckbournian comedy in Benedick's half-hearted suicide attempts, and - with a pun on Stevie Smith's famous poem, describes his bachelor life as not drowning but microwaving. Like a matrioshka doll, In a Dark Wood marvellously hides secrets within secrets. Review by STEPHEN KNIGHT. (Kirkus UK)

A seething, hollowed-out, soon-to-be-divorced actor is obsessed by his dead mother's fairy tales. Laura Perry, the mother of narrator Benedick Hunter, was an American in 1960s London and a children's book illustrator of some repute when she hanged herself after her handsome columnist husband left her for another woman. Benedick, nearly 40, mostly unemployed, and suspended by an emotional thread after his own novelist wife left him (with their two small children) to live with her posh publisher, stumbles again upon his mother's North of Nowhere stories with their eerie, haunting illustrations. In his leisurely state of self-loathing and despair, he sets out to unearth the true story behind her suicide by following the shadowy lead of her grim fairy tales of innocent, virtuous girls lured into the dark wood (Craig acknowledges her debt to the work of Ellen Handler Spitz, Alison Lurie, and Marina Warner). His reckless quest takes him and his son Cosmo to the wilderness of the States, to New York City, and to the original woods of "the Carolinas," where Craig can let fly her criticisms of American obesity, automatic cars, and fast food. While Benedick's children are scene-stealers, the younger women in his life, including his wife and the predatory singles who call him relentlessly, are shredded maliciously. Benedick's tempestuous moods are effectively, even amusingly, delineated, and despite his swampy self-pity (his successful father is "a wicked old bastard who has never loved me"), the reader ends up cheering for him when he meets his charming southern cousin Rose, a dead-ringer for his mother. Disastrously, Benedick learns that he suffers from manic-depression, but his bad moods, with medication, vanish like magic-rendering most disappointing the requisite hospital ending of this neatly written emotional saga. Britisher Craig's US debut is a perspicacious relationship drama, with some nicely researched academic touches for the literary set. (Kirkus Reviews)

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• Books > Children's Books
• Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > C > Craig, Amanda
• Books > Fiction > By Period
• Books > Study Books > Schools > GCSE > English > Literature

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