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It was the year when Madeline’s family moved to an island her father believed God had guided him to.
It was a place where she revelled in the natural beauty of their surroundings.
It was a time of euphoria, but also of successive disasters.
It was the night Madeline turned fourteen, when she did something she thought would save her beloved mother. Something so traumatic that she cannot now recall it, but her suave new psychiatrist thinks he knows how to unlock her memory. He is treading on very dangerous ground.
It was a place where she revelled in the natural beauty of their surroundings.
It was a time of euphoria, but also of successive disasters.
It was the night Madeline turned fourteen, when she did something she thought would save her beloved mother. Something so traumatic that she cannot now recall it, but her suave new psychiatrist thinks he knows how to unlock her memory. He is treading on very dangerous ground.
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Reviews
Both sinister and sharply intriguing, with a completely convincing eleven-year-old narrator caught in fundamentalism, school persecution and the edge of the miraculous
PRAISE FOR THE PROFESSOR OF POETRY: 'An astonishing and luminous novel . . . McCleen is an author who, with only her second novel, is setting her own clever agenda. She is a finished artist, but performs on the page with all the aerial grace of someone who senses no limits to what she can do.'
Moving and beautiful . . . this is a remarkable piece of work, empathetic, intelligent and genuinely poetic
Her new novel catapults her into the literary big league
PRAISE FOR THE LAND OF DECORATION: 'A tremendously affecting novel, skillfully and arrestingly written, and one that packs a big emotional punch'