The Flint Anchor - Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Flint Anchor by Sylvia Townsend Warner / ISBN 9780241476086 / 336-page paperback published by Penguin Modern Classics

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'A comic masterpiece' Patrick Gale, Guardian

Pillar of society and stern upholder of Victorian values, god-fearing Norfolk merchant John Barnard presides over a large and largely unhappy family. This is their story - his brandy-swilling wife, their hapless offspring and their changing fortunes - over the decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner's last novel, The Flint Anchor gloriously overturns our ideas of history, family and storytelling itself.

'A novel created with solidity and subtlety of feeling, a fusion of warmth, wit and quietly biting shrewdness that are reminiscent of Jane Austen' Atlantic Review

'As a sustained work of historical imagination, it has few rivals ... one of the most acute and intelligent writers of her age' Claire Harman

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893–1978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes, appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Over the course of her long career, Warner published six more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T.H. White.