Idioglossia - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Eleanor Bailey is a writer and journalist. She lives in Japan. She has recently been selected as one of twenty-one women writers in the Orange Futures promotion, highlighting the writers to watch in the twenty-first century. Her novels Idioglossia and Marlene Dietrich Lived Here are both published by Black Swan.

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For four generations of women from the same family, madness is a potent legacy. It influences their lives. It tempts, it persuades and it destroys. But it can also bring a strange kind of freedom...

Aggressive, demanding, eccentric, Great Edie curses the psychological weakness that runs through the family like a fault. No one would suspect that her psychic powers, obscured by fury and geriatric whiskers, were anything more than a business, security for her old age.

Her daughter, Grace, lives in a world of mirrors. She has languished in a mental institution for long spells of her adult life, after a tragedy years ago. Consequently Grace's only child, Maggie, grew up working with her father on a fading cruise liner. But the golden age of ocean travel is over, and a relationship with the mysterious comedian, Rudi, leaves her pregnant and alone.

Now Maggie's daughter, Sarah, is truly dispossessed and, through gratuitous sex, seeks on her loveless childhood. She rejects the world of overused cliches and overpriced coffee but can see no alternative - except to let go...