Description
This wickedly inventive fabulist tale heralds the arrival of an utterly original voice in contemporary fiction. Alone with their authoritarian father on a vast estate where time has stopped, two siblings speak a language and inhabit a surreal universe of their own making, shaped by their reading of philosophy and tales of chivalry. When their father dies and the children set out to bury him, they encounter the inhabitants of the neighboring village for the first time, and the pair's cloak of romance and superstition falls away to reveal the appalling truth of their existence. Grappling with the sudden intrusion of the world into their isolated, devastatingly veiled lives, they must confront the horror that enlightenment inflicts, and determine by whose code they will chose to live. The choices they make will obliterate everything they once held to be true, and the villagers who insinuate themselves into the siblings' reality will have to question their own views of humanity.A brilliant, masterful story in which nothing is as it first seems, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matchesis a triumph of suspense, linguistic invention, and a surprising playfulness that peers into the heart of guilt, cruelty, communication, and violence.
