Mrs Caliban (Faber Editions)

The amphibious cult classic: this magical tale of a suburban housewife's affair with a frogman is 'seductive' (Margaret Atwood), 'genius' (Patricia Lockwood), 'perfect' (Max Porter), 'a feminist masterpiece' (Carmen Maria Machado), and 'out-weirds and out-romances anything today' (Marlon James).





Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic, Larry the frogman is a revelation - and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams ... Rachel Ingalls's Mrs Calibanis a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago.



'A perfect novel.' New Yorker



What Readers Are Saying:

'Maybe the most gorgeous, lyrical book ever written'*****



'A fantastic wee novel, strange and brilliant, and absolutely the inspiration for The Shape of Water.'*****



'Wonderful, sharp minimal prose offers big truths. Superb - brilliant, in fact.'*****



'Absolutely incredible. It's weird, funny, and heartbreaking, like a Richard Yates novel except with lizardman sex.'*****



'One of the best tongue-in-cheek social satires that I've ever read. It asks the reader to examine what it means to be human ... Genius.'*****



'Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies ... Sometimes you need a sexy frog person to break you out of the ties that bind. '*****



'Hooked me so deeply I picked it up and finished it the same night.'*****

'What the hell just happened?'*****



Rachel Ingalls was born in Boston in 1940. She dropped out of school and spent time in Germany before studying at Radcliffe College, then moved to Britain in 1965. Her debut novel, Theft (1970), won the Authors' Club First Novel Award; and Mrs Caliban (1982) was named - to her surprise - one of the 20 best American novels since WWII by the British Book Marketing Council (alongside Toni Morrison, Philip Roth and John Updike). Over half a century, Ingalls wrote 11 story collections and novellas to great acclaim