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The Offering
On sale
25th June 2015
Price: £8.99
Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, 2015
Genre
It was the year when Madeline’s family moved to an island her father believed God had guided him to.
It was a place where she revelled in the natural beauty of their surroundings.
It was a time of euphoria, but also of successive disasters.
It was the night Madeline turned fourteen, when she did something she thought would save her beloved mother. Something so traumatic that she cannot now recall it, but her suave new psychiatrist thinks he knows how to unlock her memory. He is treading on very dangerous ground.
It was a place where she revelled in the natural beauty of their surroundings.
It was a time of euphoria, but also of successive disasters.
It was the night Madeline turned fourteen, when she did something she thought would save her beloved mother. Something so traumatic that she cannot now recall it, but her suave new psychiatrist thinks he knows how to unlock her memory. He is treading on very dangerous ground.
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Reviews
Extraordinary...Wonderfully suspenseful and deeply moving, The Offering is full of insights about the nature of madness. It is also keenly observant of the ways in which men play God and the power of the oppressed imagination to create an inhabitable world, even under near-intolerable conditions.
That McCleen is a writer of exceptional gifts is beyond doubt. Her prose can soar in moments of breathtaking beauty, most particularly when she turns a poet's eye on the landscape...she writes equally viscerally about her narrator's emotional terrain, depicting claustrophobia, shame and terror so painfully it makes your skin itch.
Strange and beautiful
Grace McCleen's talent for description, especially when portraying the natural world, is quite exquisite.
The richness with which Madeline describes her febrile younger self contrasts heartbreakingly with the glassy, emotionally neutered life she inhabits now...a bold, mature, terribly sad novel.
Impressive, a plausible and moving account of mental illness.
Captures the intensity of teenage anguish, and expresses a terrifying estimation of its implications, but it also dares to suggest that God can never be removed from the equation and asks: What is God?
There is an eerie sense of foreboding in Grace McCleen's wonderful third novel...Terrific and terrifying.
Award-winning author Grace McCleen returns with The Offering, a mesmerising story of innocence corrupted.
[McCleen's] vivid representations of the wild environment, loaded with symbolism and a powerful, often sinister spirituality, can bring to mind the poetry of Louise Erdrich, and a sense of fear and foreboding propels the narrative forward. The family's first spring on the island, for example, is described in a single stunning sentence [...] the denouement will leave you reeling.