The Red House Hardback - 2012

Media reviews

“Haddon writes like a scalpel-wielding angel . . .”
—Boston Globe
 
“Haddon’s tone is flawless, so compassionate and detailed and precise that this novel beguiles without cloying, illuminates without demystifying. All happy families may be alike, but oh, how wonderful to witness the myriad unhappiness of the others, conjured by a virtuoso wordsmith.”
—The Globe and Mail

“The ever surprising, often shocking, often moving and highly entertaining Mark Haddon has come up with a novel about family secrets and lies. It’s every bit as charmingly idiosyncratic as his brilliant The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”
—Daily Mirror (UK)
 
“The plot feels organic rather than contrived, the characters convincing throughout, the tone compassionate and the writing wise. A novel to savor.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
 
“It’s unlikely, however, that future visitors will find The Red House on the shelves since, with writing as elegant and truthful as this, readers will wish to keep their copies close at hand to savour again.”
—Daily Mail (UK)
 
“He is almost unrivalled at the notoriously tricky task of giving an authentic voice to children, and his ability to pinpoint the comic aspects of the everyday scenarios.”
—Sunday Times
 
“This holiday from hell gives a crafty and funny spin to the confusions of family life today.” 
—The Independent (UK)
 
“Each voice flows into the other, one person to the next. You can almost feel a camera hovering above them, zooming in and cutting away.”
—USA Today
 
“. . . it’s Haddon’s peculiar structure that raises this family drama to something exceptional. He’s perfected a constantly shifting perspective that keeps our sympathies from taking root in any one of these characters. . . . the voices are so distinct that once you can keep up, the effect is symphonic. . . . Haddon wends a careful path in this novel between the effervescent comedy of quirky families and the bitter tragedy of dysfunctional ones.”
—The Washington Post
 
“The novel’s pleasure, there in spades, lies in Haddon’s caustic wit, his pitch-perfect nailing of each of his characters, and in his absurdly concise descriptions of the most banal activities . . . In providing it, Haddon proves himself, once again, to be a brilliant, modern observer and cataloguer of human vice and frailty.”
—National Post

“Haddon, writing in the third person, takes us into one consciousness then another — and then he adds voices that are less precisely located, made up of snippets from songs, glancing references to books, films and television, random facets of the present, fragments of learning and lore, the ready-made forms of speech we all revert to, other places, other people, other times... There are also passages of authorial distancing that are highly wrought prose poetry, sinking far back into the past or into the landscape itself, the spirit of the place: choric. The effect is oddly like a rude, demotic, masculine revision of Virginia Woolf.”
—Evening Standard

“It’s a fluid, fast-paced story, with a cast of characters who are so meticulously defined that you have to marvel at the depth of the author’s imagination. Adeptly written and thoroughly engrossing, The Red House really is a return to form for Haddon.”
— Time Out – Book of the Week
 
“The ever surprising, often shocking, often moving and highly entertaining Mark Haddon has come up with a novel about family secrets and lies. It’s every bit as charmingly idiosyncratic as his brilliant The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.”
— Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror