Description
We Think the Word of You is J. R. Ackerley's only novel and like all his work it is remarkable for its unconventionality and its power to surprise. In his memoirs My Father and Myself and My Dog Tulip, Ackerley revealed the fantasies that had shaped the facts of his life. And in We Think the World of You he tells a subtle, funny, ultimately devastating story about bitterness and desire - and the disappointment that can hide behind a mask of fulfillment.
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This powerful short novel, with its extraordinary mixture of acute social realism and dark fantasy, was described by J. R. Ackerley himself as "a fairy tale for adults." Frank, the narrator, is a middle-aged civil servant, intelligent, acerbic, self-righteous, angry. He is in love with Johnny, a young, married, working-class man with a sweetly easy-going nature. When Johnny is sent to prison for committing a petty theft, Frank gets caught up in a struggle with Johnny's wife and parents for access to him. Their struggle finds a strange focus in Johnny's dog—a beautiful but neglected German shepherd named Evie. And it is she, in the end, who becomes the improbable and undeniable guardian of Frank's inner world.
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