The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

It’s lovely giveaway time again, and that means we’ve got a teetering pile of 12 copies of a rather popular new book to give away to members of our Dabbler Book Club and our esteemed, yet highly secretive League of Dabblers…

Unless you’ve been living in a cave it’s unlikely that you haven’t heard of Mark Haddon’s mid-noughtie’s smash The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which means that attention has been extremely high for his latest release, The Red House.

An dazzlingly inventive novel about modern family, the set-up of Mark Haddon’s The Red House is simple: Richard, a wealthy doctor, invites his estranged sister Angela and her family to join him for a week at a vacation home in the English countryside. Richard has just re-married and inherited a willful stepdaughter in the process; Angela has a feckless husband and three children who sometimes seem alien to her. The stage is set for seven days of resentment and guilt, a staple of family gatherings the world over.

But because of Haddon’s extraordinary narrative technique, the stories of these eight people are anything but simple. Told through the alternating viewpoints of each character, The Red House becomes a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams and rising hopes, tightly-guarded secrets and illicit desires, all adding up to a portrait of contemporary family life that is bittersweet, comic, and deeply felt. As we come to know each character they become profoundly real to us. We understand them, even as we come to realize they will never fully understand each other, which is the tragicomedy of every family.

___________________________________

We have ten copies to give away to members of the Dabbler Book Club, and two copies for members of the League of Dabblers.

How to get a free copy of The Red House by Mark Haddon
If you are already a member of the Dabbler Book Club you will automatically be entered into the draw. If you haven’t already joined, all you have to do is sign up below. It’s free.

After that, you don’t have to do anything. All members will be automatically entered into the ballot for one of 10 free review copies, which will take place on Friday 8th June. We’ll email the winners, at which point you can opt out if you really don’t want that month’s choice and would rather another member got the chance.

[contact-form 2 “Contact form 1_copy”]

Ts &Cs: All entrants will automatically be entered into the Dabbler Book Club. This means that you will receive occasional emails from us about the next monthly book and other offers. However, we will not pass your details on to any third party and you can unsubscribe at any time by emailing editorial@thedabbler.co.uk and requesting to be unsubscribed. Winners will be drawn at random from the Dabbler Book Club members at 12pm on Friday 8 June 2012. The judges’ decision is final. The Dabbler reserves the right to offer an alternative prize or to offer no prize and withdraw the competition at any time for any reason. More competitions are available at Free UK Competitions.