Lark - by Manya Wilkinson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Is growing old illegal? New from the author of Lublin, Lark is an anxious meditation on ageing, bad clothes, bad coffee, and life without Chekhov.

Locked in a secret annex with the incontinent and infirm, Lark is starting to feel like the Underground Man. Day after day she plots her escape, thinks fondly about life before it was illegal to grow old, and neurotically searches for lost objects and connections. Acidly amusing, oddball and timeless, Lark is a novel besotted with coffee, with Chekhov, and the New York of Wilkinson's own childhood: the city where a sharp mind--and a good coat from Bergdorf's--are still all you really need to survive.

Review Quotes

"Manya Wilkinson has again, following in the footsteps of her previous Lublin, written a novel like no other. Lark is a (literal) dystopia of ageing and the end of life, voiced by an utterly original narrator: hilarious, delusional, vain, brittle, spunky, indomitable, unreliable, obsessed with good coffee, men, Chekhov, her hair. It is the funniest book you will read this year until you realise your hands are shaking with grief towards the end. It is nothing short of a masterpiece."--Neel Mukherjee

Praise for Manya Wilkinson's Lublin and Ocean Avenue

"Manya Wilkinson's Lublin is marvellously impossible to categorise. At once personal and epic, on the surface it is a tale of three young friends setting off on an adventure. In a scant 200 pages it creates a portrait of the joys and costs of friendship, while also providing an effortless discourse on the history of Europe and European Jewry -- one that also looks compellingly towards the future. Wilkinson's language and imagery call up that of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleichem, Sam Beckett and Franz Kafka, yet it remains absolutely unique. This is a novel to press into the hands of strangers and exclaim, Read this book!"--Wingate Literary Prize Judges

"With its matter-of-fact approach to depicting antisemitic violence, its three guileless main characters and its artful folding-together of fable, history and Jewish joke-making, this is a story for the moment and for the ages [...] Lublin is more cogent and unflinching in its exploration of Jewish experience than Gyorgy Spiro's sprawling historical novel Captivity, and also more moving than Cormac McCarthy's alpha-male dystopia The Road in its rendering of ordinary human relationships pressured by imminent ruin."--Randy Boyagoda, New York Times

"The best novel I read this year was Lublin by Manya Wilkinson. Part picaresque, part boys' adventure story, part Freud's joke book, part immersive dive into early-20th-century Jewish life in a Polish corner of the Russian empire, this funny and devastating novel is lucid, beautiful and utterly original. Where has this author been hiding all these years?" --Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman, Books of the Year 2024

"Elya is determined to make it to Lublin no matter the cost. His dark jokes provide some of the novel's most powerful moments. Just as effective are the moments when the narrative jumps into the future to reveal villagers' ultimate fates in a world moving fast toward the Holocaust [...] A tale that uses humor to counterbalance tragedy asks if it's too late to go back home." --Kirkus Reviews

"With a wry wit that recalls Woody Allen, Wilkinson confidently and evocatively blends the historical and personal into a disturbing yet funny tale." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Manya Wilkinson is a Jewish New Yorker living in Newcastle, where she was senior lecturer in prose and scriptwriting. She is the author of Lublin (And Other Stories 2024), which won the Wingate Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, and the RSL Encore Award. Her plays and radio dramas have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Afternoon Play, Saturday Drama, Writing the Century, and Woman's Hour. Lark is her third novel.