Mrs Caliban

Mrs Caliban Synopsis

As heard on BBC Radio 4's 'A Good Read: the amphibious cult classic: a magical tale of a suburban housewife's affair with a frogman ...
'Disturbing but seductive ... Wonderful.' Margaret Atwood
'Perfect.' Max Porter
'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James
'A feminist masterpiece: tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado
''Genius ... A broadcast from a stranger and more dazzling dimension.' Patricia Lockwood
'Kind of weird and cool. ' Irvine Welsh
'Genius ... Like Revolutionary Road written by Franz Kafka ... Exquisite.' The Times
'Incredibly liberates readers from the awfulness of convention to a state where weirdness and otherness are beautiful.' Sarah Hall
'A devastating fable of mythic proportions ... Wondrously peculiar.' Irenosen Okojie (foreword)

Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic, Larry the frogman is a revelation - and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams ... Rachel Ingalls's Mrs Caliban is a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago.

'A miracle . A perfect novel.' New Yorker
'Every one of its 125 pages is perfect ... Clear a Saturday, please, and read it in a single sitting.' Harper's

What Readers Are Saying:
'Maybe the most gorgeous, lyrical book ever written'*****

'A fantastic wee novel, strange and brilliant, and absolutely the inspiration for The Shape of Water.'*****

'Wonderful, sharp minimal prose offers big truths. Superb - brilliant, in fact.'*****

'Absolutely incredible. It's weird, funny, and heartbreaking, like a Richard Yates novel except with lizardman sex.'*****

'One of the best tongue-in-cheek social satires that I've ever read. It delves into gender politics. It takes a long, hard look at mental health. It addresses female sexual freedom and agency. It asks the reader to examine what it means to be human ... Genius.'*****

'Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies that examines sad realities with hilarious verve ... Sometimes you need a sexy frog person to break you out of the ties that bind. '*****

'Hooked me so deeply I picked it up and finished it the same night ... Beautiful ... Will stay with me.'*****

'What the hell just happened?'*****

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