Mrs Caliban

Description

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

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.’