Crusoe’s Daughter

Six-year-old Polly Flint is sent to live with her two pious aunts in a yellow house close to the Irish Sea. To the lonely orphan, this bleak coast of England is so isolated she might as well be marooned on an island. The world of books-especially Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, with whose hero she will conduct a lifelong dialogue-becomes her source of emotional and intellectual nourishment. Soon the worlds of imagination and reality have only a thin divide between them.

On that barren strip of land Polly remained for more than eighty years as the twentieth century raged; lamplight and Victorian order giving way to chaos and nuclear dread. Crusoe's Daughter-wholly original, memorable, and deeply satisfying-is Polly's story, and, in part, it is also Jane Gardam's.