10th Nov 2016 6:00pm
Sallis Benney Theatre
Event
We are thrilled that this year the Big Read book is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014) by Karen Joy Fowler who will be coming from California to join us for the Big Read event on 10 November at 6pm in the Sallis Benney Theatre and will be taking part in a C21 symposium Animal Voices: A symposium on animals and contemporary literature.
Book your place at the Big Read event, 10 November 2016
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
In 1970s Indiana, narrator-heroine Rosemary is separated from her beloved "twin" sister, Fern, and sent, aged five, for a week's visit to her grandparents. "I knew the winds of doom when they blew," Rosemary recalls. She senses that she has committed a heinous crime, for which her punishment is expulsion from the bosom of the family. But no. On her return, it is the thrill-seeking Fern who has been dispatched – never to be seen again. There are no explanations.
Soon afterwards, Rosemary's stormy teenage brother Lowell absconds, also without discussion, leaving her bereft again. When he commits a series of crimes in the name of animal rights and becomes a fugitive from the FBI, a second hole is blasted in the already shaken family. More silence follows and little motormouth Rosemary, recognising a double taboo when she sees one, packs away her enthusiastically learned vocabulary and becomes an almost silent child. In time, she will be left with only a baffling series of sibling memories, recounted through caustic, guilt-tinged flashbacks. So far, so normal-ish. But "weird on stilts" lies just over the horizon…
In a startling twist, deftly held back to page 77, we learn why the family is so different to any other. *
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves resonates with Rosemary's grief for her missing alter ego and sister, and for the adored Lowell, who communicates with the family only through the occasional cryptic postcard.
* We hope you will try not to spill the beans about the twist, but if you do - it's pretty hard to resist - don't worry. One of the few studies Rosemary doesn't quote says that spoilers actually enhance reading.
Book your place at the Big Read Event, 10 November 2016
About the author
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and three short story collections. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler's previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, was a New York Times Notable Book, as was her second novel, The Sweetheart Season. Fowler's short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn't See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and five grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California.
Reviews
A novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get ... [Its] fresh diction and madcap plot bend the tone toward comedy, but it never mislays its solemn raison d'être.” - Barbara Kingsolver, New York Times Book Review
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is a dark cautionary tale hanging out, incognito-style, in what at first seems a traditional family narrative. It is anything but. This novel is deliciously jaunty in tone and disturbing in material.” - Alice Sebold
‘Many a novel has devoted itself to exploring variations of Larkin's lament about what mums and dads do to their kids. But if any other book has done it as exhilaratingly as the achingly funny, deeply serious heart-breaker that is Fowler's 10th novel, and made it ring true for the whole of mankind, I've yet to read it. This is a moral comedy to shout about from the treetops. ‘- Liz Jensen in The Guardian
For further details on the Brighton Big Read contact:
Isobel Creed
Book your place at the Big Read Event, 10 November 2016
