The Other Half of Me: A Novel,Used

Product DescriptionFor fans of Atonement and Brideshead Revisited, a gorgeously written, darkly wise comingofage novel about the pull of the past and the destructive power of the stories we tell ourselves.What good can the past do the living? What harm? Growing up in their familys ancestral home in Wales, Jonathan Anthony and his little sister, Theo, are inseparable. Together they explore the wild acres of Evendon, inventing magical worlds and buttressing each other against the loneliness of life with their alcoholic mother, Alicia, and a shifting cast of gossiping cooks and maids. When a family tragedy brings their glamorous grandmother, Eve, home from America, Jonathan and Theo are initially elated by the attention she lavishes on them. But soon it becomes clear that there is more to the Anthony family history than either Eve or Alicia will acknowledge, trapping Jonathan and Theo in a web of dark secrets that have haunted Evendon for generations.Written in luminous prose, with richly endearing characters and a profound appreciation for the rustic beauty of the Welsh countryside, The Other Half of Me is a darkly wise comingofage novel and a masterful portrait of a family and the burdens of the past.Review'McCarthys alluring, stunning debut will box her readers into an impossible cornereither to race through to see what happens next or to slow down and savor language that is mesmerizing in its evocative powers.' Library Journal, starred review'A beautiful, brooding novel of siblings growing up halfwild in a grand Welsh manor house Darkly lush, filled with an irresistibly sad glamour, this is a memorable debut.' KirkusMoving andinvolvingThe past is front andcenter in British writer McCarthys accomplished first novel Next stop: PBS? BooklistAbout the AuthorMorgan McCarthy was born in Berkshire, UK, where she still lives. She has worked in a supermarket, a small independent bookstore, and, most recently, as a media analyst.Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.CHAPTER ONEWhen I look back for a place to start I always think of the same daya day that didnt seem unusual at the time, but was necessary to what came next. It is the last day of a backward trajectory: I arrive at it as if tracing a thrown ball back through the air to the spot where the thrower stood. At the time, of course, you dont know that a ball was thrown. You hear the glass smash, then you rush to the window and look out, trying to see the culprit. This particular day begins with a summer morning; the lawn burning green; the new, nectared sunlight. I was nearly eight years old, sitting on the grass next to a patch of earth, having uprooted some irises to clear room for a castle made out of plastic blocks. I could see the top of Theos head through the remaining flowers. She was picking up ladybirds and snails and putting them lovingly into a toy pram, keeping up a gentle monologue of chatter and song thatunusuallydidnt seem to need my participation, and which I had mainly tuned out.Behind us the house sat indistinctly, the sun dazzling off its many windows, too bright to look at without squinting. Evendon, built sometime in the gloomy fifteenth century and embellished in the ambitious nineteenth by a slightly insane ancestor, was nothing like the other manors in Carmarthenshire, pale and genteel and homogenous. It was grayall different darknesses of graysteeply slate roofed with crowstepped gables, pale cornerstones, black and white facings on the eaves, arched windows with white brick edging. It resembled an Escher palace for a witch, baroque and severe, sometimes beautiful, sometimes absurdoverly grandstanding out like a blackandwhite hallucination in the tame planes of the garden. Even to us there was something odd about it.At this early time in the morning Evendon held only two people, both of whom were still asleep. The first was our mother, Alicia. She didnt like us much. That is