Little Neck - by Darcie Dennigan (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Little Neck is a feverish and hypnotic excavation of grief and inheritance, told from the naïve perspective of a girl abandoned in a cemetery as she unearths her sinister family history. Haunting and cinematic, Dennigan's second novel is set in a small New England town steeped in secrets. It follows the life of a girl who grows up tending graves under the guidance of a beloved groundskeeper. Her world unravels when he catches her exhuming a body, and she is sent to apprentice with the town's tombstone carvers. As the girl learns fragments of her hidden past, a dark family history begins to consume her. Little Neck explores themes of inheritance, desire, and grief, probing the question: Can we escape the mistakes of our parents, even when their identities are a mystery? With echoes of Ágota Kristóf, Marguerite Duras, and Marie Redonnet, Dennigan crafts a tragic, darkly humorous meditation on family and the secrets that shape us.

Review Quotes

"In the tradition of Marie Redonnet and Ágota Kristóf, Darcie Dennigan offers a vertiginous novel buttressed by a discomfiting, paratactic voice. Little Neck is earthy, creepy, and sodden with a fragmentary consciousness. The narrator advertises it convincingly: "My blood does not want to be cooled." If you had lent this book to Clarice Lispector, she would have read it and not returned it to you."--Sebastian Castillo

"Lush and obsessive, twisted and lyric... Dennigan's prose is rich and gritty and evokes the visceral instinct to survive even under nightmarish circumstances"-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"

"What a wonderful, strange, fierce, surprising, incantatory novel Darcie Dennigan has written. Oh, and it's funny. And it's not. May Little Neck find many readers, may it raise their eyebrows and drop their jaws and shake them entirely awake as it did me."--Laird Hunt

About the Author

Darcie Dennigan (Author)
Darcie Dennigan is a poet, novelist, literary critic, and co-director of the poets theatre group Spatulate Church Emergency Shift.