In a Dark Wood 2000
"The presence of mental illness, suicide, murder and incest are never allowed to overshadow the confident morality that underlies this predominantly comic and reassuring novel…a triumph for sanity."
Ruth Scurr, TLS
"Terrifyingly
intense…Craig's triumph in this book is to underscore
the way in which society treats emotions as a disability,
something to be either ironised or ignored."
Julia Bell, Financial Times.
"Craig
demonstrates that the worlds of the child and the manic
depressive are touchingly, comically close…Like
a Russian doll, this novel marvelously hides secrets
within secrets."
Stephen Knight, The Good Book Guide.
Quotes from the US:
"In a Dark Wood is a first-rate story - both psychologically
acute and mythologically convincing - and often very
funny as well"
Alison Lurie, novelist, Pulitzer
Prize-winner and editor of The Oxford Book of Modern
Fairytales.
"Amanda Craig's In a Dark Wood is tantalising,
dark,mysterious and strange. Its deft insights cut sharply
as it evokes the inside of mental illness with uncanny
lucidity and humor."
Andrew Sullivan, winner of the
National Book Award 2002 for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas
of Depression.
"In a Dark Wood explores the immensely complicated,
often open borders between imagination and mental illness.
Craig has written a rpofound account of darkness, and
she has done it in a passionate, original and beautiful
way",
Kay Redfield Jamison, author of
An Unquiet Mind.
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In A Dark Wood is about Benedick Hunter, an unemployed actor and father on the verge of divorce and a mid-life crisis. His life takes a new direction when he discovers a book of fairy tales, by his mother Laura Perry. In 1965, Laura, an American children's author and illustrator committed suicide in Primrose Hill. Benedick can remember nothing of his life until after her death, but becomes convinced that the stories and their illustrations, suggestively modeled on real people, contain a secret that will reveal why she killed herself. He is right - but, thanks to the elusive nature of fairy-tales, what he discovers is not at all what he expects.
Benedick
goes on a quest to discover the true nature of his mother,
interviewing those who knew her in the early 1960s.
Increasingly erratic, his depression apparently lifts
once he arrives in America, accompanied by his small
son Cosmo. He visits New York, then travels to the sinister
yet seductive landscape of North Carolina, where he
meets the woman of his dreams. At last, he discovers
not only the truth about Laura, but his own nature.
The short stories The
Last Straw and Away
in a Manger also feature Benedick Hunter.