Thursday, July 19, 2012

Top ten homes in literature

Stuart Evers's debut novel If This is Home now available in the UK from Picador books.  Ben East, in his review of the book for The Observer, called the "excellent, multilayered debut novel...a quiet triumph."

One of Evers's top ten homes in literature, as told to the Guardian:
Dr Jekyll's house in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Only at home do Jekyll and Hyde coexist; segregated between the front, where Jekyll presents his public persona, and the back, where his laboratory has created Hyde. It is a home in turmoil – something brilliantly exploited by Valerie Martin in Mary Reilly – and yet it is the only place where Jekyll can truly be himself.
Read about the other entries on the list. 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also appears on H.M. Castor's top ten list of dark and haunted heroes and heroines and John Mullan's list of ten of the best butlers in literature, and among Yann Martel's six favorite books. It is one of Ali Shaw's top ten transformation stories and Nicholas Frankel's five best pieces of decadent writing from the nineteenth century.

--Marshal Zeringue