Description

The amphibious cult classic: this magical tale of a suburban housewife’s affair with a frogman is ‘seductive’ (Margaret Atwood), ‘genius’ (Patricia Lockwood), ‘perfect’ (Max Porter), ‘a feminist masterpiece’ (Carmen Maria Machado), and ‘out-weirds and out-romances anything today’ (Marlon James).

Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research – but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic, Larry the frogman is a revelation – and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams … Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs Caliban is a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago.

‘A perfect novel.’ New Yorker

What Readers Are Saying:
‘Maybe the most gorgeous, lyrical book ever written’*****
‘A fantastic wee novel, strange and brilliant, and absolutely the inspiration for The Shape of Water.’*****
‘Wonderful, sharp minimal prose offers big truths. Superb – brilliant, in fact.’*****
‘Absolutely incredible. It’s weird, funny, and heartbreaking, like a Richard Yates novel except with lizardman sex.’*****
‘One of the best tongue-in-cheek social satires that I’ve ever read. It asks the reader to examine what it means to be human … Genius.’*****
‘Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies … Sometimes you need a sexy frog person to break you out of the ties that bind. ‘*****
‘Hooked me so deeply I picked it up and finished it the same night.’*****
‘What the hell just happened?’*****