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Elaine

By Will Self
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Brief Description
Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity. Guardian Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders... is this it? As she... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
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A brilliant portrait of motherhood, sublimated desire and the reverberations of the Cold War in a novel that investigates and reimagines the life of the author's mother.

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Elaine is not just a serious work of art, but an unexpected act of filial generosity. Guardian

Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders... is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life.

Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence. Perhaps the first work of auto-oedipal fiction, Elaine shows Self working in an exciting new dimension, utilizing his stylistic talents to tremendous effect.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781804710494

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 03 July 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Grove Press

Edition: Main

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 24.0mm

Width: 130.0mm

Height: 197.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 304

Collections

Fiction General Fiction Literary Fiction Will Self

About the Author

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including Great Apes; How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Shark; Phone; the memoir Will; and the essay collection Why Read. He lives in South London.

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