The Poison That Fascinates

Jennifer Clement writes like a painter. Her books are vivid with colour and detail, and reading The Poison That Fascinates is like leafing through a folio of portraits, each colour-soaked page leading us irresistibly to the next, giving us fresh vision as to how stories can be made. -- Kirsty Gunn, author of Featherstone and The Boy and the Sea An astonishing novel, every line alive, leading as if effortlessly to a shocking climax . . . A work of power and originality. * * ALAN SILLITOE, author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner * * You would be forgiven for mistaking Clement's novel for a book of poetry, such is its lyricism and lightness of touch ... Clement's simple lilting prose poetry belies a dark complexity hidden below the surface and draws the reader on to the book's chilling conclusion. * * The Times, on A True Story based on Lies * * This is an unusual and graceful book that, in beautiful and precise prose, tells of unimaginable human suffering and manages, in an unexpected climax, to suggest at least the possibility of redemption. * * New Internationalist * * Jennifer clement threads silky imagery through dense subject matter in a novel/novella with the hybrid vigour of literary experimentation. * * Scotland on Sunday * * Praise for Widow Basquiat: A starkly beautiful elegy to a painter and high-strung muse, by a poet whose gossamer language morphs itself into shapes as jagged, disturbing and righteously angry as Basquiat's work itself. * * i-D * *

Deserted by her mother as a baby, Emily lives with her father in Mexico City, working in the local orphanage. When a mysterious cousin, Santi, appears on the doorstep, he brings with him family secrets, and soon Emily finds desire and temptation have overturned her straightforward life forever. The Poison that Fascinates is an alluring fable forged in astonishing, sensuous prose. Jennifer Clement conjures a world heavy with the weight of Mexican superstition, mythology and faith, where saintliness and mortal sin sit side by side.