{"product_id":"the-vets-daughter-isbn-9781590170298","title":"The Vet's Daughter","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe Vet's Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife's death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHarrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King, \u003ci\u003eThe Vet's Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.“Comyns's world is weird and wonderful. Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I'd go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.” —Lucy Scholes, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Comyns has a pictorial eye, and though she wrote stories from a young age, she originally thought of herself as a sculptor and painter...[her] wild but exact style is always instantly recognizable, a mix of looseness and compression.” —Jé Wilson, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I’d like also to recommend \u003ci\u003eThe Vet’s Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e by Barbara Comyns, which hit me like  a dangerous drug earlier this year: one of the best books I’ve ever read.\" --Wesley  Stace, \u003ci\u003eThe Believer\u003c\/i\u003eBarbara Comyns (1909–1992) was born in Bidford-on-Avon, in the English county of Warwickshire, one of six children of an increasingly unsuccessful Birmingham brewer. Living on the run-down but romantic family estate and receiving her education from governesses, she began to write and illustrate stories at the age of ten. After her father’s death, she attended art school in London and married a painter, with whom she had two children she supported by trading antiques and classic cars, modeling, breeding poodles, and renovating apartments. A second marriage, to Richard Comyns Carr, who worked in the Foreign Office, took place during World War II. Comyns wrote her first book, \u003ci\u003eSisters by the River\u003c\/i\u003e (1947), a series of sketches based on her childhood, while living in the country to escape the Blitz, which is also when she made an initial sketch for \u003ci\u003eThe Vet’s Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e. This, however, she put aside to complete \u003ci\u003eOur Spoons Came from Woolworths\u003c\/i\u003e (1950), about her first marriage, and \u003ci\u003eWho was Changed and Who was Dead\u003c\/i\u003e (1955). \u003ci\u003eThe Vet’s Daughter\u003c\/i\u003e was published in 1959. Among Barbara Comyns’s other books are the novels \u003ci\u003eThe Skin Chairs\u003c\/i\u003e (1962) and \u003ci\u003eThe Juniper Tree\u003c\/i\u003e (1985), and \u003ci\u003eOut of the Blue into the Red\u003c\/i\u003e (1960), a work of nonfiction about Spain, where she lived for eighteen years.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300041478373,"sku":"NP9781590170298","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590170298.jpg?v=1767742071","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-vets-daughter-isbn-9781590170298","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}