HomeGroupsTalkMoreZeitgeist
Search Site
This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Your use of the site and services is subject to these policies and terms.

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

Red House by Mark Haddon
Loading...

Red House (original 2012; edition 2012)

by Mark Haddon

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,2319015,641 (3.14)55
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, which results in a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams, and rising hopes.
Member:nowright
Title:Red House
Authors:Mark Haddon
Info:Jonathan Cape (2012), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 272 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:None

Work Information

The Red House by Mark Haddon (2012)

  1. 10
    The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling (Anonymous user)
  2. 00
    This is Just Exactly Like You by Drew Perry (JGoto)
    JGoto: About a dysfunctional family, but written with humor.
  3. 00
    All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland (SimoneA)
    SimoneA: Both books tell the story of a family with issues, from their different viewpoints. 'All Families' does it with lots of black humor, 'The Red House' with an interesting approach to the viewpoints.
  4. 01
    Deutschland by Martin Wagner (baystateRA)
    baystateRA: Both books have a tangle of reticent English family members misunderstanding each other while on holiday
Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 55 mentions

English (89)  Dutch (1)  All languages (90)
Showing 1-5 of 89 (next | show all)
Really loved it! I liked Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and A Spot of Bother very much so I was looking forward to this. My initial feeling was that it was confusing and hard to read but I got to really enjoy it as I continued to read it. It's a strange format for a novel but I thought it really worked. ( )
  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
A contemporary novel that focuses on sister and brother, Angela and Richard who meet for a holiday with their families in a rented farmhouse for an extended period together for the first time in twenty years. There are tensions between the two with Angela harbouring resentment that she was left to care for their mother after their father’s early death and also of Richard’s successful career. These tensions are exacerbated by internal conflicts within Angela’s and Richard’s marriages and with their children. Haddon revealingly captures these difficulties between the two and those between the parents and their children, as the latter in their teens, seek to carve out their own independent lives, yet are still reliant to some extent on their parents. This leads to a tortuous week together where a greater understanding of each other is somewhat overshadowed by other secrets that are kept hidden.
  camharlow2 | Oct 13, 2021 |
Mark Haddon's latest book the Red House is a stream of consciousness novel about two contemporary family of Brits spending a week of vacation together in a house in the English Countryside. At the center is Richard, a doctor and his sister Angela who have some unfinished business at the recent passing of their mother. Each brings to the house their respective spouses and children--three of the four being teens. Put them all together under one roof, each with their own secrets, have them interact and see what happens. Haddon is most famous for his last book--the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a book written from the point of view of an autistic boy who solves a mystery. That book I loved--this one was a bit of a chore. I started it last June but put it down for several months because it requires a more slow read. I had a hard time tracking the characters and who was speaking or thinking at any time. This is that dang stream of consciousness which I've never been a big fan of--apologies to Virginia Woolf fans. There are times when his prose is brilliant and poetic. He can take you from that contemporary setting back across years in one descriptive paragraph such as this one describing the house: "The Red House, a Romano-British farmstead abandoned, ruined, plundered for stone, built over, burnt and rebuilt. Tenant farmers, underlings of Marcher lords, a pregnant daughter hidden in the hills, a man who put a musket in his mouth in front of his wife and sprayed half his head across the kitchen wall, a drunken priest who lost the house in a bet over a horse race, or so they said, though they are long gone. Two brass spoons under the floorboards. a 20,000-reichsmark banknote. Letters from Florence cross-written to save paper, now brown and frail and crumpled to pack a wall. Brother, my Lungs are not Goode...." That paragraph made me pick up the book again and hang in there. There are more passages like that and they made the book worth reading when they surfaced. ( )
  auldhouse | Sep 30, 2021 |
Where to start? No use of quotation marks and constantly changing point of view make this book so much more trouble than it was worth. Throw in the annoying and obscure streams of consciousness and lack of symapthy for a single character, and that makes for a shit read. Fortunately this book is saved by its total lack of plot. Hard to believe his first was so brilliant. ( )
  MuggleBorn930 | Jul 11, 2021 |
A domestic novel, beautifully done. Add an extra half star. Not quite anarchic enough for me - still love the Agent Z books the best.... ( )
  Ma_Washigeri | Jan 23, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 89 (next | show all)
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.
 
If you want truly great literature set in an English country house, you still can’t beat Wodehouse’s Blandings books for deep-core contentment and unbridled comic zip. “The Red House,” on the other hand, reads as if it were written to silence those critics who damn Haddon with the faint praise of being too “readable.” Mission accomplished.
 
Shortly after their mother's death, wealthy doctor Richard invites his estranged sister and her family to accompany him on holiday in the Welsh countryside with his new wife and teenage stepdaughter. Angela convinces her husband and their three children to come on the premise that it's the best, or only, vacation they can afford, and so begins the novel's seven-day drama—each relative descending on the country manse. Haddon engages the reader with his intimate portrayals of realistic and knowable, though by and large not wholly likable, characters; and for a week, familial alliances are made and broken enough for a 100-years' war. The book's ambition is perhaps greater than the ends it achieves—although comfortably paced and plotted, the frenetic changes in narrator are often disorienting. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.
added by kthomp25 | editBooklist
 
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Information from the Dutch Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Epigraph
Dedication
To Clare, with thanks to Mary Gawne-Cain
First words
Cooling towers and sewage farms.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Original language
Canonical DDC/MDS
Canonical LCC

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English

None

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, which results in a symphony of long-held grudges, fading dreams, and rising hopes.

No library descriptions found.

Book description
Two families. Eight lives. One week. What could go wrong?

A week after their mother's funeral Angela receives a call from her brother Richard inviting her for a week's holiday in the Welsh borders. Families included. Angela and Richard had spent twenty years avoiding each other, and can't remember why. 'I'm not looking forward to it any more than you' she says to her husband. 'But I didn't have a great deal of choice.'

In the isolated valley, a semblance of holiday is quickly achieved – reading, exploring, alcohol – each family acting as a buffer for the other, a distraction from their own problems. But fissures soon appear. Dominic, an out of work musician, is wary of the wife he doesn't love any more. Richard is hoping that something will be resolved or mended or rediscovered over the few days, but his sister has an anger he can't fathom. The teenagers circle each other cautiously. Eight-year-old Benjy is more intent on throwing sheep poo.

Over the course of the week the eight must not only contend with each other but also the lives they have left behind – the actions and secrets that quietly invade the house and the holiday to devastating effect.

Narrated in turns by each character, The Red House is an extraordinary portrait of the complexities of family life, and of eight very different people coming together and falling apart over the course of a week.
Haiku summary

LibraryThing Early Reviewers Alum

Mark Haddon's book The Red House was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Current Discussions

None

Popular covers

Quick Links

Rating

Average: (3.14)
0.5 3
1 17
1.5 1
2 54
2.5 10
3 86
3.5 44
4 75
4.5 10
5 17

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

About | Contact | Privacy/Terms | Help/FAQs | Blog | Store | APIs | TinyCat | Legacy Libraries | Early Reviewers | Common Knowledge | 202,662,025 books! | Top bar: Always visible