Nelly's Version
Description
Eva Figes' inventive reshaping of the psychological thriller, Nelly's Version--part dark comedy, part mystery novel--offers an unsettling journey into the mind of a witty woman stuck in a pastless present.
A middle-aged woman suffering from amnesia checks into a small-town hotel under the pseudonym Nelly Dean with a suitcase full of cash and no idea where it, or she, came from. Distrustful of everyone from the waiter who serves her lunch to the store clerk who claims to know her from grade school, Nelly fears she is part of a conspiracy. At the same time, however, she remains strangely indifferent to the clues that might explain her puzzling circumstances and is unaffected by the many assaults, robberies, arsons, and other crimes occurring around her.
Named after the housekeeper in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Nelly Dean is an endearingly unhinged character who will fascinate and excite readers in this deranged literary thriller, featuring an introduction by Susan Faludi.
More details
Persons
Eva Figes is the author of over a dozen novels as well as written works on literary criticism, feminism, and memoirs. Born in Berlin in 1932, Figes was a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany before her family relocated to the UK in 1939. In the 1960s she was inducted into an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall that included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin, and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.
Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A contributing editor for Newsweek and a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has written for many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, Double Take, and The Nation. She lives in Los Angeles.