A House and Its Head

"Abuse, adultery, incest, extortion, and murder: these are among the secrets guarded - or shared - by the respectable families at the center of Ivy Compton-Burnett's darkly comic and deeply subversive novels. Writing almost entirely in dialogue, Compton-Burnett stages a series of conversational duel [...]
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"Abuse, adultery, incest, extortion, and murder: these are among the secrets guarded - or shared - by the respectable families at the center of Ivy Compton-Burnett's darkly comic and deeply subversive novels. Writing almost entirely in dialogue, Compton-Burnett stages a series of conversational duels in which the destructive interaction of power, desire, and domesticity is dramatized as nowhere else." "Among the most unsparing of Compton-Burnett's books, A House and Its Head dissects the domestic establishment of Duncan Edgeworth. Duncan is a tyrannical pater familias who can't stop remarrying, while his daughters can't get married at all. And Grant, Duncan's nephew, can't stop fooling around. Soon enough the family's conflicting interests set off a series of increasingly appalling transgressions, made all the more scary by the ease with which, in the end, the survivors accept the results."--BOOK JACKET.