Great Granny Webster

Name: Great Granny Webster
Brand: Little Brown
Price: 22.75 AUD
Availability: PreOrder

By: Caroline Blackwood

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Paperback | 9 June 2026 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Format
Paperback

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 12.6 x 2.2

Paperback

RRP $22.99

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Available: 9th June 2026

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Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece, shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - a gothic family drama in miniature

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.

'One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived' Virginia Feito

'Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith' Araminta Hall

'Idiosyncratic, dark and extremely funny' Lucy Scholes

'Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's best book. In the monstrous old dowager of Hove, and the ruling class she represents, Blackwood found a subject grandly commensurate with her own extraordinary style of aghast relish' Jonathan Raban

'A unique literary experience' Philip Larkin

'Great Granny Webster feels more like a memoir than a novel...but it is as gripping as a whodunit' TLS

'Full of genuine black humour' London Review of Books

Industry Reviews

Matriarchal relations are haunted by a phantom man - in this case a father - but the narrator is all eye and ear, the better to capture the indelible characters of Granny Webster and Aunt Lavinia. The book is full of genuine black humour - London Review of Books

Blackwood's works delve deeply into complicated, ugly relationships between women, something that is especially fascinating when the author herself was defined throughout her lifetime by her marriages to high-profile men. Persistently, Caroline Blackwood is hailed through the ages as the ultimate muse-which is a disgrace. She should be hailed as one of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived

Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's best book

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