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All the Little Bird-Hearts: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

Book

By Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

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LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS’ CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2024
‘Delicate and strong… I loved it’ Maggie O’Farrell’
‘Darkly vivacious… mesmerising’ Guardian
‘Immaculate’ Financial Times
‘A triumph’ Daily Telegraph

For readers who loved Sorrow and Bliss or Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – an unforgettable story of a mother and daughter whose lives are upended when a charming new couple move in next door.

Sunday Forrester lives with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Dolly, in the house she grew up in. She does things more carefully than most people. On quiet days, she must eat only white foods. Her etiquette handbook guides her through confusing social situations, and to escape, she turns to her treasury of Sicilian folklore. The one thing very much out of her control is Dolly – her clever, headstrong, teenaged daughter.

Into this carefully ordered world step Vita and Rollo, a couple who move in next door, disarm Sunday with their charm, and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in Sunday’s book. Soon they are in and out of each others’ homes, and Sunday feels loved and accepted like never before. But beneath Vita and Rollo’s polish lies something else, something darker. For beneath Vita’s charm lies a desperation and a certain entitled ambition – to have a daughter just like Dolly, all to herself.

Reviews

21 Oct 2023

Annette

A small slice of neurodivergent life. An autistic author and an autistic narrator make for quite a tense novel about an unexpected friendship between two women. The underlying tension seems to come from the protagonist's fear of having misread situations or people and their intentions but is also from the reader's doubt about the new friend's motive for the friendship. I found the book at times to be amusing, surprising, boring, and intriguing. It's a quiet, unexciting book that will stay with me for some time while I try to figure it out.

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