Good Behaviour (New York Review Books Classics)

ISBN: 168137529X

Author: Keane, Molly

Condition: New

Shortlisted for the Booker PrizeA wickedly funny satire of Irish society after WWI, featuring delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them (Vulture).Hilarious and sinister. -The New York TimesIs it possible to kill with kindness? As Molly Keanes Booker Prize-short-listed dark comedy suggests, not only can kindness be deadly, it just may be the best form of revenge. The novel opens as Aroon St. Charles prepares to serve her invalid mother a splendid luncheon-the silver gleams, the linens glow-of rabbit mousse, a dish her mother despises. In fact, a single whiff of the stuff is enough to knock the old lady dead. All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives, says Aroon soon after. In the pages that follow she will make her case, reminiscing about her youth among the hunting-and-fishing classes of Ireland, a faded aristocracy dedicated to distraction even as their fortunes dwindle.Keanes brilliant sleight of hand is to allow her blinkered heroine to narrate her own development from neglected child, to ungainly debutante, to bitter spinster: Aroon understands nothing, yet she reveals all.