Endeavour reprint
Darkness and Day by Ivy Compton-Burnett (1951)
When Sir Ransom Chace is reunited with his god-daughter Bridget, and her husband Edmund Gaunt, long dead secrets start to creep out of the wood-work.
Chace and Gaunt both have two daughters borne out of happy marriages, but both have also fathered another daughter out of wedlock.
As aging Chace debates age, life, and morality with his best friend and two daughters, he realises he wants to clear his conscience before he dies.
Meanwhile the two young Gaunt daughters overhear a shocking secret about their parents relationship...
What happens when a dignified man comes to believe that his wife is also his daughter...?
Conveyed almost entirely in dialogue, Compton-Burnett's novel was ground-breaking for its time, experimenting with style and content.
"[my own writing is] much inferior to the bitter truth and intense originality of Miss Compton-Burnett" - Virginia Woolf
"Everyone in it is either protecting himself from the truth or unearthing it...the reader is exhilarated - by the author's iron courage and by her austere diction, which can rise to poetic grandeur ..." - Sunday Times
"Miss Compton-Burnett is totally unlike any other novelist. Wit and melodrama have never been so combined before, and the combination is a brilliant success.... She is a unique figure in modern English literature." - Philip Toynbee
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was a contemporary of Virginia Woolf. Her own tragic experiences of family life provided some of the material drew on as a novelist. Her books are about money, power, status, incest, adultery, murder, homosexuality, about which she was years ahead of her time, and all the passions and stresses of family life, described with brilliant wit and perception.
Oops, added links
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TE8IJWU/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00TE8IJWU/
http://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00TE8IJWU/