
Before The Knife
Carolyn Slaughter(Author)
Black Swan (Publisher)
Published on 1. January 2003
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-0-552-99988-5 (ISBN)
Description
Carolyn Slaughter is the author of ten novels, but for the last 12 years she has been completely silent. She had become conscious that there was something hidden in her past that had always haunted her fiction but which she had never fully faced. This memoir is the result of confronting the truth about her traumatic childhood. Carolyn's father was in the colonial service, but he lacked power and was ashamed of his Irish origins. In private, he was capable of acts of absolute sadism. When Carolyn was small, they lived comfortably in Swaziland having left India during the Partition. But when she turned six, things changed. Her mother gave birth to another daughter and they were posted to a remote area in the Kalahari desert. Bereft of a civilized social life, her mother plunged into a deep depression and turned completely away from Carolyn. While her older sister found friends and left for boarding school, Carolyn suffered a desperate sense of abandonment and loss and turned to the landscape of the Kalahari itself for solace. The stark fact that Carolyn was first raped by her father at the age of six is contained within the prologue and epilogue of this book.
What lies in between is the story of an extraordinary childhood in Africa and a moving depiction of the complexities at the root of our relationships with mother, father, siblings
What lies in between is the story of an extraordinary childhood in Africa and a moving depiction of the complexities at the root of our relationships with mother, father, siblings
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Transworld Publishers Ltd
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 200 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
186 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-552-99988-5 (9780552999885)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
09/2010
1st Edition
Transworld Digital
€6.49
Available for download
Person
Carolyn Slaughter's first novel The Story Of The Weasel won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She followed it with nine further novels. She now works as a psychotherapist and lives in America.