Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary Hampstead family observed in all its turbulence by the teenage Stibbe, working as the nanny. Written as letters home to her sister, Love, Nina won over fellow writers and critics; reviews spoke of a quirky, life-affirming comic genius.
Now she’s written her first novel, and again she has the domestic arena in her sights. Man at the Helm is a wicked anatomising of a dysfunctional family seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old narrator.
Think What Maisie Knew with laughs and four-letter words, plus a touch of The Young Visiters — baroque formality undermined by an engagingly frank view of sex. Henry James meets Daisy Ashford.
When adults behave like children, the kids grow up fast, and Stibbe doesn’t shirk the destructive effects of parental negligence: Lizzie Vogel, her sister, aged 11, and little brother, enjoy a blissfully privileged life until one evening in 1970 their mother listens in to her husband’s telephone.
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