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  • Published: 31 May 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446425084
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

Bethany Bettany



'Rich, cool and engagingly intelligent prose. D'Aguiar's imagery lingers long after reading. This is a deep and powerful work of imagination' - Daily Telegraph

A Caribbean country on the verge of collapse. A small town called Boundary. A rambling house inhabited by three generations of the Abrahams family. And a little girl who is trying to make sense of it all.

Bethany Bettany is five years old when her father dies and her mother leaves her to fend for herself in the Abrahams household. The place simmers with resentment: her uncles and aunts think her mother killed her father; her grandmother refuses to leave her room. Bethany is the scapegoat for it all.

In Bethany, D'Aguiar has created both a loveable character and a symbol for the search of a nation to make itself whole. If Boundary is Guyana, then Bethany Bettany - a girl torn between two names - is the spirit of its people poised for flight.

  • Published: 31 May 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446425084
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 320

About the author

Fred D'aguiar

Fred D'Aguiar is a poet and novelist. Born in 1960, he was raised in Guyana and London. He is currently Professor of English and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech State University. His first novel, The Longest Memory, won the 1994 Whitbread First Novel Award.

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Praise for Bethany Bettany

'Immediately pleasurable... touching and suspenseful

Observer

This book is beautifully written, the characters intriguing

Scotland on Sunday

Fred D'Aguiar's powerful and original work employs all kinds of poetic rhythms and shapes to dramatise the dreams, struggles and desires of his protagonists. He has helped to create a new kind of novel... How beautifully D'Aguiar writes about eroticism and sensuality. The novel is a paean to love lost and found again

Independent

Evocative

Independent on Sunday

D'Aguiar's forte is in getting under the skin of his character... an ambitious novel

The Times

A magical tale full of potent emotion

Metro

His sentences glow with poetry, creating pictures that stay with the reader

Good Book Guide