Short description
The author of The Jane Austen Book Club presents another highly inventive novel--one that ensnares readers in cunning deceptions, challenging them to separate the truth from fiction.
Long description
If you loved The Jane Austen Book Club, youall revel in Witas End, a sly and clever novel of mystery, intrigue, and virtual reality. Witas End is many things: a quest novelaa young womanas search for the truth about her dead fatheras past; a mysteryathe story of a long-ago murder in which that father might have been complicit; and a gameaone that ensnares readers in cunning deceptions, challenging them to separate the true from the fictive. Set in contemporary Santa Cruz, the novel centers on Rima Lanisell, a young woman at loose ends, having just lost her father to cancer. (Rima seems to lose people and things habituallya sunglasses and car keys, lovers and family members.) Now she has come to coastal California at the behest of her godmother, Addison Early, who once knew Rimaas father well. Perhaps too well. Rima is on a mission to discover just what that relationship was really about. Addison, a bestselling mystery writer, is secretive and feisty. Over the years, she has tried to protect her work and her privacy as her passionate fans have become ever more intrusive. In this age of the Internet, with its blogs, chat rooms, websites, its Wikipedia, false personas, and hidden identities, those fans have begun to take over the plot lines and the life of her famous fictional detective. For many, he is more real than Addison herself. So Witas End is also a highly inventive take on the way dedicated readers appropriate their favorite books, perhaps the one act of theft applauded the world overaexcept by authors. Above all, Witas End is Karen Joy Fowler at her most subversive and witty, creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is uniquelyand memorably her own.
Review
aShe has a voice like no other, lyrical, shrewd and addictive, with a quiet deadpan humor that underlies almost every sentence.a
aBeth Gutcheon, Newsday
aWhat strikes one first is the voice: robust, sly, witty, elegant, unexpected and never boring. Here is a novelist who absolutely comprehends the pleasures of imagination and transformation.a
aMargot Livesey, The New York Times Book Review