Margins
Prodigal book cover
Prodigal
2018
First Published
3.63
Average Rating
360
Number of Pages

'The phone rings, in that short-tempered peremptory way machines have. He almost doesn't answer; he's been fending off unwanted offers of insurance, unlimited broadband, crates of discount wine for months now. His name must be on some list somewhere - Jeremy Eldritch, sucker...' Meet the hapless Jeremy: a man in his late 50s, he scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of 'Nathalie Cray'. When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside. Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family's chequered past. The journey takes him back to the unexpected death of his mother in a provincial Greek hospital years earlier and, further back, to the moment at which the Eldritch family fell apart. It's a journey composed of revelations, of secrets disclosed and not disclosed, and of something that might, or might not, be reconciliation... An atypical coming-of-age tale, Prodigal deftly reconsiders everything we think we know about the nature of trust, death, and what we do to each other in the name of love.

Avg Rating
3.63
Number of Ratings
38
5 STARS
24%
4 STARS
29%
3 STARS
34%
2 STARS
13%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Charles Lambert
Charles Lambert
Author · 11 books
Charles Lambert was born in the United Kingdom but has lived in Italy for most of his adult life. His most recent novel is Birthright, set in Rome in the 1980s and examining what happens when two young women discover that they are identical twins, separated at birth. In 2022, he published The Bone Flower, a Gothic love story with a sinister edge, set in Victorian London. His previous novel, Prodigal, shortlisted for the Polari Prize in 2019, was described by the Gay & Lesbian Review as "Powerful… an artful hybrid of parable (as the title signifies), a Freudian family romance, a Gothic tale, and a Künstlerroman in the tradition of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” For the Kirkus Review, The Children's Home, published in 2016, was 'a one-of-a-kind literary horror story', while Two Dark Tales, published in October 2017, continues to disturb. Earlier books include three novels, a collection of prize-winning short stories and a memoir, With a Zero at its Heart, selected by the Guardian as one of its top ten books from 2014.
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