WARNER

Ed.: Charles Dudley Warner

Editor: Charles Dudley Warner

Like Viscontis film The Leopard, this magnificent novel paints in sensuous colours the story of a family. It brings to new life the ancient disparaged south of the Italian peninsula, weakened by emigration, silenced by fascism.According to family legend, David Pittagora died as a result of a duel. His death is the mysterious pivot around which his grand-daughter, an independent modern woman, constructs an imaginary memoir of her mothers background and life. She follows the family as they emigrate to New York - where they find only humiliation and poverty - and after their return to Italy in the early 1920s. As she is drawn by the passions and prejudices of her own imagination, we see how family memory, like folk memory, weaves its own dreams.

A sequel to his acclaimed début Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, confirms that Alan Warner boasts an extravagant talent... This novel is set on a Scottish island that contains a variety of weird landmarks and an hallucinogenic cast of characters - including a DJ who wants to set up the rave to end all raves, a visitor whose job is to assess candidates for sainthood and the wonderfully unfazed heroine, Morvern Callar - Harry Ritchie, Mail on SundayA powerful, hilarious and original novel about the intersection of lives in the rough and ready communities and wild landscapes of the Scottish Highlands.