 | |
| Author | Pauline Melville |
|---|---|
| Country | Guayana |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Publication date | 1997 |
| Pages | 368 |
| ISBN | 1-58234-009-9 |
The Ventriloquist's Tale is a novel by British Guayanese author Pauline Melville, published in 1997 by Bloomsbury Publishing. The book follows an indigenous Guyanese family across several generations. The novel attracted generally positive reviews. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
Melville was partly inspired to write the novel after reading Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust . [1]
The novel's plot focuses on a Wapishana family over the course of a century. A framing device is used, in which a present-day subsistence farmer named Chofy McKinnon moves from the bush to Guyana's capital city, Georgetown. The narrative explores McKinnon's ancestry. The ventriloquist, a being that is part bird, part spirit, provides commentary.
Critics gave The Ventriloquist's Tale mostly positive reviews. The New York Times said the novel was "sumptuously written" and compared Melville's writing to the work of Evelyn Waugh. [2] The Guyana Chronicle claimed the book "should be mandatory reading for anybody who claims to have an interest in the literature of Guyana." [3] [4]
The Ventriloquist's Tale won the 1998 edition of the Whitbread First Novel Award. [5] It was also shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in the same year. The award's website described the book as "large in scope but intimate as a whisper." [6]
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was an English writer from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often macabre tales set among the English working class. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 by Charlotte Higgins as "a national treasure". In 2008, The Times named Bainbridge on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
William Andrew Murray Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
A Handful of Dust is a novel by the British writer Evelyn Waugh. First published in 1934, it is often grouped with the author's early, satirical comic novels for which he became famous in the pre–World War II years. Commentators have, however, drawn attention to its serious undertones, and have regarded it as a transitional work pointing towards Waugh's Catholic postwar fiction.
Kate Atkinson is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She is known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series Case Histories. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 in the Novels category for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, winning again in 2013 and 2015 under its new name the Costa Book Awards.
William Trevor Cox, known by his pen name William Trevor, was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.
Gerard Woodward is a British novelist, poet and short story writer, best known for his trilogy of novels concerning the troubled Jones family, the second of which, I'll Go to Bed at Noon, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize.
Pauline Melville FRSL is an English-Guyanese born writer and former actor of mixed European and Amerindian ancestry, who is currently based in London, England. Among awards she has received for her writing – which encompasses short stories, novels and essays – are the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Guyana Prize for Literature. Salman Rushdie has said: "I believe her to be one of the few genuinely original writers to emerge in recent years."
The Costa Book Awards were a set of annual literary awards recognising English-language books by writers based in UK and Ireland. Originally named the Whitbread Book Awards from 1971 to 2005 after its first sponsor, the Whitbread company, then a brewery and owner of restaurant chains, it was renamed when Costa Coffee, then a subsidiary of Whitbread, took over sponsorship. The companion Costa Short Story Award was established in 2012. Costa Coffee was purchased by the Coca-Cola Company in 2018. The awards were abruptly terminated in 2022.
Paul Murray is an Irish novelist, the author of the novels An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void.
Rachel Cusk is a British novelist and writer.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. Her 2014 Costa Poetry Award was for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Jane Mary Gardam is an English writer of children's and adult fiction. She also writes reviews for The Spectator and The Telegraph, and writes for BBC radio. She lives in Kent, Wimbledon, and Yorkshire. She has won numerous literary awards, including the Whitbread Award twice. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015-2018) and winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007) she has published seven novels, many short stories and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Essays on literary themes appear in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and she writes for the books pages of The Irish Times and The Guardian. Her fiction explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
Neil Griffiths is a British novelist, and the founder of the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses. He is the winner of the Authors' Club First Novel Award, and has been shortlisted for best novel in the Costa Book Awards.
Shena Mackay FRSL is a Scottish novelist born in Edinburgh. She was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for The Orchard on Fire, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2003 for Heligoland.
The Fire-Eaters is a 2003 children's novel by David Almond.
Clara Callan is a novel by Canadian writer Richard B. Wright, published in 2001. It is the story of a woman in her thirties living in Ontario during the 1930s and is written in epistolary form, utilizing letters and journal entries to tell the story. The protagonist, Clara, faces the struggles of being a single woman in a rural community in the early 20th century. The novel won the Governor General's Award in English fiction category, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Trillium Book Award.
Sceptre is an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, a British publishing house which is a division of Hachette UK.
Monique Roffey, FRSL, is a Trinidadian-born British writer and memoirist. Her novels have been much acclaimed, winning awards including the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, for Archipelago, and the Costa Book of the Year award, for The Mermaid of Black Conch in 2021.