The lost father

'An idiosyncratic and haunting novel: lush, slow-paced, sensual, metaphorical and, at the same time, anxiously worrying over the demands of kinship and the trail of history. . . this is a cultural historian's novel and the scholarly curiosity that went into Marina Warner's fine books on female myths and iconography makes here for a devotedly careful recreation' Hermione Lee, OBSERVER 'THE LOST FATHER has all the pleasures of a literary crossword puzzle, combined with a brilliantly realised women's world of snail hunting and water carrying, of the terrors of the PASSEGIATA and of old maidhood. It is Warner's best novel so far. . . ' Lorraine Fletcher, GUARDIAN