The Pelican Child
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Profile Books Ltd
Published:4th Dec '25
Should be back in stock very soon
A biting new collection of stories featuring misfits across time and space from award-winning visionary Joy Williams
Lauded as the best story writer of our time, Joy Williams returns with a taut collection that responds to our modern dilemmas with her signature dry wit and deftness of touch. In sinister and shifting landscapes, we meet souls lost and found: from the twin heiresses of a dirty industrial fortune, who must commit a violent act in recompense for their family's deeds, to a newly grown man who still revolves in a dreamscape of his childhood boarding-school innocence, to the "pelican child", who lives with the bony, ill-tempered Baba Yaga in a little hut on chicken legs. For readers of Lorrie Moore, Mary Gaitskill and George Saunders, these haunted stories examine the instincts separating us from the beastly and the divine.
Pithy, spiky and defiantly strange ... Williams hopes to reignite our sense of wonder in the world, so that we might be rallied to protect it. Here, at the height of her powers, she may just triumph * Financial Times *
My platonic ideal of a writer ... Williams blends the real and fantastical and is very funny - sometimes cruelly so -- Chris Power * Observer *
Relentlessly layered, so funny, defiantly uncomfy and uncanny * TLS *
A vast and far-reaching collection ... Joy Williams is one of the form's living masters * Irish Times *
This isn't one to miss * Daily Express *
Praise for Joy Williams * - *
I've been a fan of Joy Williams since I first read her -- Ali Smith
Williams is the kind of funny you can't explain ... a master of the craft -- Anne Enright * Guardian *
Williams is a writer for our times: both visionary and caustic, knowing yet also full of wonder -- Catherine Taylor * Financial Times *
Williams is one of the most pioneering fiction writers of our time -- Andrew Motion * New Statesman *
Joy Williams' off-kilter, surreal visions of our world are unforgettable -- Sophie Mackintosh
Unique, intelligent and fascinating ... The uncompromising and often surreal tales have been crafted with a distinctive style, offering a mix of fables and fantasy * Buzz Magazine *
Nothing short of revolutionary -- Neel Mukherjee * New Statesman *
ISBN: 9781805228578
Dimensions: 196mm x 126mm x 22mm
Weight: 161g
176 pages
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