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Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Beloved' by Annah Faulkner

by
June 2013, no. 352

The Beloved by Annah Faulkner

Picador, $27.99 pb, 313 pp, 9781742611556

Gillian Dooley reviews 'The Beloved' by Annah Faulkner

by
June 2013, no. 352

God gave me polio?’ Taken aback by her grandmother’s bland insistence on unquestioning submission to divine will, the six-year-old child in Annah Faulkner’s novel The Beloved has already started questioning the articles of faith and the assumptions of the adults in her world, in that penetrating way some children have. Clearly she is not going to take to religion. Other early certitudes fall away as she gets older: Father Christmas; her parents’ love for each other; her mother’s understanding of her deepest nature. 

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