A powerful tale of grief and survival – from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch
‘This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light’ ALICE MUNRO
‘Extraordinary and luminous… the best novel I’ve read this year’ JUNOT DIAZ
‘Incandescent and utterly original’ NEW YORK TIMES
‘A glowing, powerful and immensely readable paean to the power of family’ INDEPENDENT
In 1950s West Virginia, seventeen-year-old Lark and her younger half-brother Termite, who is unable to walk or talk, are being raised by their Aunt Nonie. Their mother Lola is absent, Termite’s father is still caught up in the chaos of the Korean War, and Lark doesn’t even know who her father is.
One night, a flood roars through town. Amid the debris and destruction, the truths of Lark’s personal history begin to surface. And as the mysteries of the past come to light, the lives of Lark and Termite will be changed forever.
‘This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light’ ALICE MUNRO
‘Extraordinary and luminous… the best novel I’ve read this year’ JUNOT DIAZ
‘Incandescent and utterly original’ NEW YORK TIMES
‘A glowing, powerful and immensely readable paean to the power of family’ INDEPENDENT
In 1950s West Virginia, seventeen-year-old Lark and her younger half-brother Termite, who is unable to walk or talk, are being raised by their Aunt Nonie. Their mother Lola is absent, Termite’s father is still caught up in the chaos of the Korean War, and Lark doesn’t even know who her father is.
One night, a flood roars through town. Amid the debris and destruction, the truths of Lark’s personal history begin to surface. And as the mysteries of the past come to light, the lives of Lark and Termite will be changed forever.
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Reviews
What a beautiful, beautiful novel this is - so rich and intricate in its drama, so elegantly written, so tender, so convincing, so penetrating, so incredibly moving. I can declare without hesitation or qualification that Lark and Termite is by far the best new novel I've read in the last five years or so
Phillips knows how to bypass the reader's brain and inject her words directly into the bloodstream
A stylistic tour de force... Pure, rapt poetry
Moving and suspenseful... Phillips weaves the characters' stories masterfully, touching on betrayal and forgiveness, war's horror, natural disaster, secrets of the past, the love and dedication of an extended family of friends, mystery and death
An extraordinary and brilliant piece of writing...a powerful and tender portrayal of a family
Remarkable. It is a strange and joyous book which will yield much to the patient reader
A moving meditation on the redemptive power of family and love
You finish Lark and Termite wanting to turn back to the first page and start over, making sure not to miss a single note
Phillip's writing is distinctive, audacious and powerful
Remarkable... Swings from spare to sumptuous... An intricate, affecting portrait of a darker corner of the American '50s
Riveting and moving... Lark's pragmatism, clear-eyed love and determination to hold on to her brother are strikingly fresh and heroic
Lark and Termite is extraordinary and it is luminous. This is not simply classic Jayne Anne Phillips. This is something far more extraordinary. It is an astounding feat of the imagination. It is the best novel I've read this year
This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light
An intense tale of love, loss and the bond of family that survive, almost miraculously, over time and space... What could have been a fairly conventional story... is transformed by Phillips into something extraordinary
A richly textured novel with a wondrous story at its heart about the many permutations of love and the complexities it engenders
Phillips returns to working class lives in what may be her most tender, most compassionate book to date... Extraordinary
Jayne Anne Phillips renders what is realistically impossible with such authority that the reader never questions its truth... The fantastic dream that's created in Lark and Termite is one the reader enters without ever looking back
Evocative... Lark and Termite offers substantial rewards for readers who value passages of gorgeous, intelligent writing
Reverberates with echoes of Faulkner, Woolf, Kerouac, McCullers and Michael Herr's war reporting, and yet it fuses all these wildly disparate influences into something incandescent and utterly original... Phillips' characters are so indelible, so intimately drawn, that they threaten to move in and take up permanent residence in the reader's mind
Consistently inventive, evocative and uncompromising. Haunting is a word much overused, but Lark and Termite is exactly that: a novel whose elegant lingering images are hard to shake from the memory. This is a glowing, powerful and immensely readable paean to the power of family