A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said Mary McCarthy of Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose austere, savage, and bitingly funny novels anything can happen and no one will ever escape. The long, endlessly surprising conversational duels at the center of Compton-Burnett's works are confrontations between the unspoken and the unspeakable, and in them the dynamics of power and desire are dramatized as nowhere else. New York Review Books is reissuing two of the finest novels of this singular modern geniusâ€”works that look forward to the blacky comic inventions of Muriel Spark as much as they do back to the drawing rooms of Jane Austen. A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose willful ways provoke a series of transgressions that begins with adultery and ends, much to everyone's relief, in murder.

A House and Its Head

COMPTON-BURNETT, IVY.

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

Dudley Gaveston's inheritance from an elderly godfather changes his relationship with his brother's family

A Family and a Fortune

Eleanor Sullivan begins to feel trapped in her life with nine children in the house of her husband's parents

Parents and Children (Penguin Modern Classics)

Literary

The Present and the Past

Foxing to tanned page edges, one corner of pages a little damp wrinkled. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

A God and His Gifts

When Catherine becomes determined to re-enter the life of her former husband, he is angered by the friendship that develops between Catherine and his second wife

The Present and Past

Penguin Classics

The tyrannical Horace Lamb abuses his household by his oppressive manipulations of his wife, cousin, children, and servants

Manservant and Maidservant (Twentieth Century Classics)

Classics

Oxford University Press

First published in 1957, this novel consists almosts entirely of dialogue. The central figure, Miles Mowbray, is one of Compton-Burnett's most successful characters.

A Father and his Fate (Twentieth Century Classics)

Genre Fiction

Dover Publications

Last and the First

David&Charles

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Books by COMPTON-BURNETT, IVY.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by COMPTON-BURNETT, IVY.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A House and Its Head

A Family and a Fortune

Parents and Children (Penguin Modern Classics)

The Present and the Past

A God and His Gifts

The Present and Past

Manservant and Maidservant (Twentieth Century Classics)

A Father and his Fate (Twentieth Century Classics)

The Present and the Past

Last and the First