Dispossession: A Novel of Few Words

Description

A stunning 'Victorian' graphic novel based on a little-known novel by Anthony Trollope England, 1873. John Caldigate, a young gentleman, gets into debt gambling and decides to try his luck in the gold fields of New South Wales. On the outward journey, he promises to marry Mrs Smith, a divorced actress who is travelling in the same ship. Returning home a rich man, John marries Hester, the sweetheart he left behind. Soon, Mrs Smith also returns from Australia, penniless, and claims that she is already his wife. Inspired by Anthony Trollope's 1879 novel John Caldigate, Dispossession embeds the reader in a uniquely wrought experience of the mid-nineteenth century, including the first ever appearance of the Aboriginal Wiradjuri language in a graphic novel. Taking unique advantage of the graphic form to conjure the material world of the Victorian era in a glittering waltz of intense colour and deep shadow, Dispossession is a virtuoso and intensely affecting graphic novel by a master visual storyteller.

Simon Grennan is an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist, comics scholar and author of over forty comics and artist's books. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Chester.

Grennan has a special interest in the 19th century, and his book is full of feeling for the period... Richly satisfying. -- Rachel Cooke * Observer * Brilliant and dizzying graphic novel... Such subtlety makes this a novel of remarkable power, written and drawn with humour and dark authority. It is a work that disturbs one's self-possession, catching the "perhapses" that characterize both Trollope's world and our own. -- Sophie Ratcliffe * Times Literary Supplement *