THE SASKIAD
New edition from Penguin Books available now
“A novel wise in the complexities of adolescence and the human heart.” —The Washington Post
Longing to escape the rundown commune outside of Ithaca, New York where she lives with her organic-farmer mother, assorted half-siblings, and a cow named Marilyn, the precociously well-read Saskia White, twelve, imagines herself as the noble contemporary of Odysseus, Marco Polo, and Horatio Hornblower. But Saskia’s elaborate fantasies are soon upstaged by her real-life, long-lost father, who leads Saskia and her best friend Jane on a camping trip that turns into an epic adventure of love, sex, and lies.
Saskia is as unforgettable as her own heroes, a young girl whose story resonates with a rare and joyous sense of life and discovery.
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Praise for The Saskiad
“With each surprising turn of plot, The Saskiad seems to draw on new reserves of imaginative energy, and its heroine’s bedrock honesty and freshness of perception make her story a continual delight . . . Deftly employing a classical structure, with nods along the way to modern writers as diverse as Herman Melville, Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, [Hall] has produced a multilayered post-modernist work of exhilarating ambition and inventiveness, an American book of wonders.”
—The New York Times
“Beautiful . . . Saskia speaks in a pastiche of received languages, most of them—like the shards of the Odyssey that crop up everywhere—grandiose, stilted, and unexpectedly lovely.”
—The New Yorker
“Richly imagined . . . lyrical and compelling.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“Spectacularly inventive . . . [The Saskiad] uses the legacy of one generation to examine the power of history and the lure of the myths that shape us all.”
—Glamour
“Brian Hall has captured the essence of an adolescent . . . Slipping in and out of Saskia’s beautifully described romances, he plays exhilarating games with myth and narrative—and secrets—which invest his text with colour, movement and a magical quality.”
—The Times (London)
“The Saskiad manages, magically, to attain mythic grandeur while remaining entirely true to its contemporary premise, simultaneously an adventure and a psychological portrait, simultaneously vast and meticulously, beautifully detailed and observed. The key to this breathtaking balancing act is Hall’s passionate imagining of the inner life of his extraordinary protagonist; her coming-of-age is charted unsentimentally, with real insight, compassion and wit.”
—Tony Kushner
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