Books like A Stranger Still by Anna Kavan
FROM THE BOOK JACKET:
A Stranger Still was first published in 1935 under Anna Kavan’s early married name of Helen Ferguson. An intriguing, well-plotted story, it was much acclaimed at the time, and its freshness and vigour remain undiminished.
The wealthy Lewison family occupy centre stage. William, a widower, presides forcefully over his empire of Greater London stores, as well as over his sons, Cedric and Martin, and his impressionable daughter, Gwenda. A fictional ‘Anna Kavan’ appears as a young girl adrift from her husband and now in pursuit of romantic fulfillment. The story takes us from fashionable and Bohemian London to Paris, the South of France and Italy. The autobiographical element is implicit for those familiar with the author’s enigmatic life.
Anna Kavan captures the ambience of the thirties with conviction, yet her pre-hallucinogenic writing has the uninhibitedness and immediacy of a novel of today. (From the book jacket, british reprint published in 1995).
First publish date: 1995
Authors: Anna Kavan
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Books similar to A Stranger Still (9 similar books)
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Anna Kavan’s experimental novel explores identity and reality through repeated lives, asking who we truly are amid shifting circumstances.
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The author of this extraordinary novel was a heroin addict who died by her own hand in December of 1968 [Note: this is not proven - J.H.]. Out of her terrifying experience with mental illness she created a body of fiction of intense, near-surrealist artistry, but it is only posthumously that she is receiving the wider acclaim which her writing commands.
The present work, first published in 1956, contains some of her finest prose and is clearly autobiographical in nature. It tells the story of a young girl, rejected by her narcissistic and vengeful mother, whose life thereafter is yet another series of betrayal that can lead only to the dead-end of madness and death. Like Sylvia Plath, Anna Kavan was capable of nearly perfect control over language as she strove to describe, in the simplest and most ordinary of terms, the bizarre and hallucinatory landscape of her oncoming and inevitable derangement. (From the book jacket, first american edition, published in 1972).
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I am Lazarus is a collection of post‑war short stories by Anna Kavan, set in Blitz‑era London and reflecting her experiences working with invalided soldiers at a military neurosis centre.
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Celina, driven by a desire to escape her wealthy father and seek independence, marries a man she meets, journeys to the Far East, becomes widowed, writes a successful career, and ultimately wrecks the lives of her daughter and sister‑in‑law.
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