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Dusty Answer

On sale

1st August 2013

Price: £10.99

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Selected: ebook / ISBN-13: 9780349004297

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ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE BRITISH WRITERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

‘The lyrical, sensuous quality . . . puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers’ THE TIMES

‘It will consume you . . . transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read’ JONATHAN COE

‘There are qualities in this book that mark it out as quite the most striking first novel of this generation’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘Mamma was fast asleep at home, her spirit lapped in unconsciousness. Her dreams would not divine that her daughter had stolen out to meet a lover.
And next door also they slept unawares, while one of them broke from the circle and came alone to clasp a stranger . . . ‘

Judith Earle, over-earnest and inexperienced, has always been a little in love with each of the four cousins who come to stay next door and, on her return from Cambridge, becomes madly in love with one of them – Roddy, the ‘sensation-hunter’. Dusty Answer traces with delicate nostalgia childhood friendships and the pangs of thwarted young love. This novel is about Judith’s consuming relationship with the Fyfe family, who each fall in love with Judith, transforming her young womanhood.

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Reviews

Harriet Lane, Independent
Lehmann's story is both universal and deliciously particular, like all the best coming-of-age stories. No one has written more brilliantly about having one's heart broken, about despair and longing, humiliation and hope: all the wretched thrilling chaos that accompanies growing up. Finding it at fifteen felt a little like stumbling upon magic. Miraculously, all these years and re-readings later, it still has that effect on me
Atlantic
Whoever loves the earth, and especially whoever loves English earth, will drink delicious draughts from this book; for not only beauty, but the ache of beauty, is alive in it
THE TIMES
The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers
Elizabeth Jane Howard
[Lehman] is immensely readable, acute, passionate, funny and original
Margaret Drabble
Lehmann has always written brilliantly of women in love, of mothers and daughters
Sunday Times
It is not often that one can say with confidence of a first novel by a young writer that it reveals new possibilities for literature. But there are qualities in this book that mark it out as quite the most striking first novel of this generation . . . The modern young woman, with all her frankness and perplexities in the semi-pagan world of today, has never been depicted with more honesty, or with more exquisite art
Spectator
This is, indeed, one of the most charming and convincing studies of young womanhood that we have read for some time
Jonathan Coe
It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read
The Times
The lyrical, sensuous quality of her descriptive writing and her clear yet compassionate insight into individual psychology puts her immediately into the front rank of English writers
Jonathan Coe
It will consume you entirely, transforming your whole inner life for the time it takes to read
Telegraph
Beautifully written and observed, and an interesting representation of the ideas of and pressures upon a generation of intellectual women immediately after the Great War