Lanny

By: Max Porter

Narrated by: Annie Aldington, Clare Corbett, Jot Davies, David Timson

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019

From the award-winning author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers comes a dark, playful, propulsive novel about an ethereal young boy who attracts the attention of a mythical, menacing force.

There's a village an hour from London. It's no different from many others today: one pub, one church, red-brick cottages, some public housing, and a few larger houses dotted about. Voices rise up, as they might anywhere, speaking of loving and needing and working and dying and walking the dogs. This village belongs to the people who live in it, to the land, and to the land's past.

It also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, a fabled figure local schoolchildren used to draw green and leafy, choked by tendrils growing out of his mouth, who awakens after a glorious nap. He is listening to this twenty-first-century village, to its symphony of talk: drunken confessions, gossip traded on the street corner, fretful conversations in living rooms. He is listening, intently, for a mischievous, enchanting boy whose parents have recently made the village their home. Lanny.

With Lanny, Max Porter extends the potent and magical space he created in Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. This brilliant novel will enrapture readers with its anarchic energy, with its bewitching tapestry of fabulism and domestic drama. Lanny is a ringing defense of creativity, spirit, and the generative forces that often seem under assault in the contemporary world, and it solidifies Porter's reputation as one of the most daring and sensitive writers of his generation.

©2019 Max Porter (P)2019 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic reviews

“Porter is an enchanter with words.... Elegantly mysterious: a story worthy of an M.R. James or even a Henry James and a welcome return by an author eminently worth reading.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

“In his bold second novel, Porter combines pastoral, satire, and fable in the entrancing tale of a boy who vanishes from an idyllic British village.... This is a dark and thrilling excavation into a community’s legend-packed soil.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)

“Despite reading it twice, I suspect Lanny will be a novel I will return to again, simply to absorb the strangeness of the story, the cleverness of the structure, the authenticity of the dialogue and the ethereal mystery that surrounds the book’s titular character. For those who are put off my experimental fiction, and I confess to being one, this is a novel to shatter your prejudices.” (John Boyne, The Irish Times)

Brilliant work, superb reading

I read this marvellous, imaginative, compelling and polyphonic book years ago and wanted to revisit with audio. The performance is excellent. My only note is you should picture Toothwort’s cacophony of community voices as all spoken at once rather than one after the other – that is what the book intended and this is not too hard to do.

Porter has this wonderful ability to shift between mundane description, everyday speech, and gorgeous, poetic language. When the poetry hits, it really hits. I’m such an admirer.