Grasshopper
The tenth Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in 2000
When I wrote Grasshopper I did a lot of electricity stuff, because my principal character was a female electrician, and I didn’t know anything about that. I bought a book called Electrics Made Easy. Well, a couple of years later I was in Switzerland talking to the husband of my translator — a very nice man who was a top-grade electrician — and he said to me, By the way, I would like to congratulate you on your novel Grasshopper, because all the electrics were absolutely right.
An insect has six legs … and so does a pylon. It’s a grasshopper hopping across the fields.
Blamed by her parents for the tragic death of a friend, Clodagh has been banished from their home in the countryside to a dingy basement flat in the city.
Her life is transformed when she meets the inhabitants on the top floor of 15 Russia Road. An exotic range of young people who explore a London of roofs, eaves and ledges, thrilling in the freedom and danger.
Notes
Barbara Vine builds an urban narrative out of pediments and architraves in Grasshopper.
—Vanessa Thorpe 2Grasshopper is a meditation on heights and depths, windows and passages, roofs and stairways, enclosed spaces and limitless expanses, not to mention trapped characters.
—Dennis Drabelle 3
Contemporary Reads 4
Karin Fossum - Calling out for You
Arnaldur Indriðason - Jar City
Donna Leon - Friends In High Places
Tracy Chevalier - Girl with a Pearl Earring
Muriel Spark - Aiding and Abetting
Margaret Atwood - The Blind Assassin
Footnotes
P.D. James and Ruth Rendell discuss the development of crime writing since the age of Agatha Christie, and why it deserves to be taken as seriously as ‘mainstream’ fiction. RSL Review 2006. ↩︎
Fancy a night on the tiles (and the chimneys)? The Guardian 2000. ↩︎
Meddlers on the roof. Washington Post, 2000. ↩︎
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