CAROLINE BLACKWOOD'S MASTERPIECE, SHORTLISTED FOR THE 1977 BOOKER PRIZE

*A New Yorker summer reading pick of 2026*
'Full of genuine black humour' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
'A darkly comic treat' CHRIS POWER, OBSERVER
'Wickedly amusing' SUNDAY TIMES
'A masterpiece . . . her humour is as wicked as it is mordant' JOHN BANVILLE

*
In her gloomy mausoleum of a home, the terrifying matriarch Great Granny Webster spends her days sitting bolt upright in a Victorian chair, entirely alone except for her one-eyed maid - and her orphaned great-granddaughter, sent to stay for the sea air. She presides over three generations of ill-fated women, and a twisted family history which spools back through hedonistic 20s London to a crumbling aristocratic pile where two children are kept silently hidden in a distant wing.

This macabre, viciously funny, partly autobiographical novel cuts to the bone of a dysfunctional dynasty, and captures Blackwood at her pitch-black best.
*

'Idiosyncratic, dark and extremely funny' LUCY SCHOLES
'A unique literary experience' PHILIP LARKIN
'Gloriously wicked' THE TIMES
'As gripping as a whodunit' TLS
'Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's best book' JONATHAN RABAN
'Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith' ARAMINTA HALL
'One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived' VIRGINIA FEITO

Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996) was born into a rich Anglo-Irish aristocratic family. She rebelled against her background at an early age and led a hectic and bohemian life, which included marriages to the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as 'a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers'. In the 1970s Blackwood began to write. Her novel Great Granny Webster was shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize.