Description

Sabine Ponsonby presides over her large household with despotic force, rivalled only by her imperious daughter, Hetta. As her needling cruelties cause one governess after another to flee, the family’s younger generation begins to stir in revolt, and the seeds for a reckoning are sown.

Written in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s iconic style, where dialogue seethes with veiled insults and manipulations,?Daughters and Sons?is an acidic comedy of cold deceptions, mistaken identities and family struggles for dominance.

Publisher Review

'Original, artful and elegant... To read her for the first time is a singular experience' - Hilary Mantel 'Shrewd, sly, mordantly funny and magnificently odd, few literary voices are as distinctive, or as entertaining, as Ivy Compton-Burnett's. To see a novel of hers back in print is always a cause for celebration' - Sarah Waters 'Compton-Burnett anatomised primal emotions in a genteel arena: there are shades of Jane Austen here, as well as Pinter and Muriel Spark, but she remains entirely original - funny, shocking, horribly true' - Justine Jordan 'She is as much part of our great twentieth-century fictional heritage as Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen... She writes wonderfully, giving her often ghastly characters mordantly witty lines worthy of Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde' - Guardian 'Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life' - Telegraph