Great Granny Webster

<p><b>Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece, shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - a gothic family drama in miniature</b><br><br>In her gloomy mausoleum of a home, the terrifying matriarch Great Granny Webster spends her days sitting bolt upright in a Victorian chair, entirely alone except for her one-eyed maid - and her orphaned great-granddaughter, sent to stay for the sea air. She presides over three generations of ill-fated women, and a twisted family history which spools back through hedonistic 20s London to a crumbling aristocratic pile where two children are kept silently hidden in a distant wing. <br><br>This macabre, viciously funny, partly autobiographical novel cuts to the bone of a dysfunctional dynasty, and captures Blackwood at her pitch-black best. <br><br>'One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived' <b>Virginia Feito</b><br>'Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith' <b>Araminta Hall</b><br> 'Idiosyncratic, dark and extremely funny' <b>Lucy Scholes</b><br>'Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's best book. In the monstrous old dowager of Hove, and the ruling class she represents, Blackwood found a subject grandly commensurate with her own extraordinary style of aghast relish' <b>Jonathan Raban</b><br>'A unique literary experience' <b>Philip Larkin</b><br>'Great Granny Webster feels more like a memoir than a novel...but it is as gripping as a whodunit' <b><i>TLS</i></b><br>'Full of genuine black humour' <i><b>London Review of Books</b></i></p>