The author of the critically acclaimed Schooling returns with a darkly comic novel about a mentally unpredictable woman intent on giving a young boy a proper education.
After leaving her husband and their suffocating marriage for a new lover in Rome, the narrator of Heather McGowan's Duchess of Nothing has her freedom, but is still trapped by the routine of life and haunted by her past. Even worse, her lover, Edmund, is just as self-absorbed and remote as her former husband. Her one source of entertainment is Edmund's seven-year-old brother, a curious, precocious, and defiant child who becomes her responsibility during her lover's long absences. Spending their days together, they wander the city, simultaneously repelled by and drawn to each other as she teaches him important lessons he would otherwise never learn in school, such as "marriage is a tomb" and being an expert liar is key to getting ahead in the world. But when Edmund abandons them altogether, the amusing relationship between the narrator and her charge suddenly becomes a necessity, and she realizes how much she has come to depend on the boy.
Clever, wry, and acutely aware of her own precarious grasp on the world around her, the narrator of McGowan's pitch-perfect novel speaks with a cutting honesty and a hilarious, twisted logic that keeps us riveted to the page.
Heather McGowan is the author of the novel Schooling, which was listed as Best Book of the Year 2001 by Newsweek, the Detroit Free Press, and the Hartford Courant. She lives in Brooklyn.
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"Imagine Mary Poppins with a heavy dose of Sylvia Plath...[the book has] a sneaky irresistible charm"--New York Times Book Review
"this woman without a name is so marvelous, so wise and ditzy, so committed to the pure spirit of this abandoned boy that you cannot help but fall utterly in love with her."--Los Angeles Times
"An engrossing, entertaining book…[McGowan] beautifully characterizes her unnamed protagonist in a voice that is by turns tragic, farcical, pathetic, poignant and hilarious."--San Francisco Chornicle
"...the narrator of "Duchess of Nothing" is truly an extraordinary character."--Newsday
"Duchess of Nothing recalls Robert Browning's wonderful dramatic monologues of the 19th century. McGowan writes sharp, observant prose"--Seattle Times
"Strange and startling…beautiful and jagged, immensly comic and oddly moving."
--People
"A truly original premise, artfully developed into a memorable and perversely entertaining comic horror story."--Kirkus (Starred Review)
"Readers will find that nameless woman's mind still moving restlessly within them."
--starred Publishers Weekly
"Heather McGowan is the most elegant, arresting, and lucid prose stylist I have encountered in years."-- Rick Moody
"Heather McGowan once again reclaims wit, philosophy and beauty as among the birthrights of great fiction."--Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli
"Heather McGowan is a writer of fierceness and humor and intelligence, and in this book her writing soars."--Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
"You must get to this book. Read it. Wonder. Marvel. McGowan is a stylist with few peers. You will quote sentences for the rest of your days."--Detroit Free Press
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