MCGOWAN, HEATHER
Duchess of nothing

Bloomsbury, New York. 2006. First US edition. First printing. Hardcover. Octavo. Half black boards with brown spine with gold lettering. Deckled edges. With brown endpapers. With illustrated not price-clipped dustjacket.

215 pp. 15,25 x 21,25 x 2 cm. 386 gr. ISBN-10 1596910666. ISBN-13 9781596910669. Jacket illustration by David Eldridge / Two Associates. Author photograph by Lana Bernberg.


The author of the startling, critically acclaimed first novel Schooling, which Newsweek called "moving, challenging, almost bewilderingly beautiful", returns with a darkly comic new novel, as impressive as her debut, about a mentally unpredictable woman intent on giving a young boy a proper education.

After leaving her husband and her suffocating marriage for the romance and promise of Rome, the narrator of Duchess of Nothing has her freedom but is still trapped by the routine of life and haunted by her past. Her one source of entertainment is her lover Edmund's seven-year-old brother, a curious and defiant child who becomes her responsibility during her lover's long absences. Spending their days together, they wander the city, simultaneously repelled by and drawn to each other as she teaches him important lessons he would otherwise never learn in school. But when Edmund abandons them altogether, the amusing relationship between the narrator and her charge suddenly becomes a necessity, and she realizes how much she has come to depend on the boy.

Charming, manic, and acutely aware of her own precarious grasp on the world around her, the narrator of McGowan's novel speaks with a kind of absurd logic that makes this book impossible to put down.


Text clean and unmarked. Fine hardcover book in fine dustjacket.


BOOKNUMBER: 20271