Great Granny Webster

Caroline Blackwood''s masterpiece, shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - a gothic family drama in miniature

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.

This macabre, viciously funny, partly autobiographical novel cuts to the bone of a dysfunctional dynasty, and captures Blackwood at her pitch-black best.

''One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived'' Virginia Feito
''Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith'' Araminta Hall
''Idiosyncratic, dark and extremely funny'' Lucy Scholes
''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'' Jonathan Raban
''A unique literary experience'' Philip Larkin
''Great Granny Webster feels more like a memoir than a novel...but it is as gripping as a whodunit'' TLS
''Full of genuine black humour'' London Review of Books