Mrs Caliban

Description

The amphibious cult classic: a magical tale of a suburban housewife’s affair with a frogman …

‘Genius … Like Revolutionary Road written by Franz Kafka … Exquisite.’ The Times

‘Ingalls incredibly liberates readers from the awfulness of convention to a state where weirdness and otherness are beautiful and right.’ Sarah Hall [Observer Books of the Year]

‘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

‘A devastating fable of mythic proportions … Wondrously peculiar.’ Irenosen Okojie (foreword)

‘Perfect.’ Max Porter

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