In a bravura feat of storytelling, Mark Haddon calls upon narratives ancient and modern to tell the story of Angelica, a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship with her father.
When a young man named Darius discovers their secret, he is forced to escape on a boat bound for the Mediterranean. To his surprise he finds himself traveling backwards over two thousand years to a world of pirates and shipwrecks, of plagues and miracles and angry gods.
Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, Haddon conjures the worlds of Angelica and her would-be savior in thrilling fashion. As profound as it is entertaining, The Porpoise is a stirring and endlessly inventive novel from one of our finest storytellers.
Mark Haddon is the author of the bestselling novels The Red House and A Spot of Bother and of the story collection The Pier Falls. His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and is the basis for the Tony Award-winning play. He is the author of a collection of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea, and has won awards for both his radio dramas and his television screenplays. His play, Polar Bears, was produced by the Donmar Warehouse in 2010. He lives in Oxford, England. www.markhaddon.com
"Electrifying. . . . As thrilling as it is thoughtful." - The Washington Post
"Perfect. . . . I found myself repeatedly checking the cover, making sure the book was written by a human and not an AI designed to compose the best novel this side of the 20th century." - Randy Rosenthal, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Haddon's writing is beautiful, almost hallucinatory at times, and his descriptions so rich and lush and specific that smells and sights and tastes and sounds . . . all but waft and dance off the page." - The New York Times
"[A] magical journey . . . readers will not come out of it untouched." - NPR
"Magic and myth meld in this luminous . . . retelling of the drama Pericles that resonates anew in our own divisive era." - O, The Oprah Magazine
"Compulsively readable. . . . Haddon writes with wrenching beauty about how the world inflicts itself on the disadvantaged." - Time
"A breathless, delightful, utterly absorbing read. . . . A book of thrilling, salt-caked adventures that scintillate like sunlight on the surface of the sea." - Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian
