Why did James love this book?
Leonora is one of my favourite artists; thus, I strongly suspected I would also love her writing. This novel is set in an isolated retirement village, complete with eccentric inhabitants, surreal architecture and a tongue-in-cheek back story structured in the style of an old-fashioned gothic novel.
Marian Letherby, a geriatric Nancy Drew, must unravel a series of mysteries and murder plots before time runs out, not just for her, but for the world itself (cue unexpectedly apocalyptic ending).
I loved that this book focuses on characters in their twilight years but was written with a mischief and playfulness usually associated with children’s books. It gave me hope that old age might be more fun than I thought…
4 authors picked The Hearing Trumpet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel.
Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several…