Great Granny Webster

Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece, shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize

This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives.


'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