Edward Carey

"An amazing achievement. . . A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself." --Gregory Maguire, New York Times-bestselling author of Wicked The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud. In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and . . . at the wax museum, heads are what they do.In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel--a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.

The Iremongers have taken up what was not wanted and wanted it.Clod is an Iremonger. He lives in the Heaps, a vast sea of lost and discarded items collected from all over London. At the centre is Heap House, a puzzle of houses, castles, homes and mysteries reclaimed from the city and built into a living maze of staircases and scurrying rats. The Iremongers are a mean and cruel family, robust and hardworking, but Clod has an illness. He can hear the objects whispering. His birth object, a universal bath plug, says 'James Henry', Cousin Tummis's tap is squeaking 'Hilary Evelyn Ward-Jackson' and something in the attic is shouting 'Robert Burrington' and it sounds angry.A storm is brewing over Heap House. The Iremongers are growing restless and the whispers are getting louder. When Clod meets Lucy Pennant, a girl newly arrived from the city, everything changes. The secrets that bind Heap House together begin to unravel to reveal a dark truth that threatens to destroy Clod's world.

Along with his parents and other equally maladjusted misfits and eccentrics, Francis Orme lives in Observatory Mansions — once a magnificent ancestral home with beautiful grounds, now a crumbling apartment block. In a blocked-off corridor of the basement is Francis’s Exhibition: a carefully catalogued and private display of hundreds of items he has stolen, all of them once precious to their original owners. But the arrival of a new tenant upsets the delicate balance of Observatory Mansions, and Francis finds himself taking drastic measures to protect the secrets of his past, the sanctity of his collection and his mission of love.

I am writing this account, in another man's book, by candlelight, inside the belly of a fish. I have been eaten. I have been eaten, yet I am living still. From the acclaimed author of Little comes this beautiful and haunting imagining of the years Geppetto spends within the belly of a sea beast. Drawing upon the Pinocchio story while creating something entirely his own, Carey tells an unforgettable tale of fatherly love and loss, pride and regret, and of the sustaining power of art and imagination.

Foulsham, London's great filth repository, is bursting at the seams. The walls that keep the muck in are buckling, rubbish is spilling over the top, back into the city that it came from. In the Iremonger family offices, Grandfather Umbitt Iremonger broods: in his misery and fury at the people of London, he has found a way of making everyday objects assume human shape, and the real people into objects.Abandoned in the depths of the Heaps, Lucy Pennant has been rescued by a terrifying creature, Binadit Iremonger, more animal than human. She is desperate and determined to find Clod. But unbeknownst to her, Clod has become a golden sovereign and 'lost'. He is being passed as currency from hand to hand all around Foulsham, and yet everywhere people are searching for him, desperate to get hold of this dangerous Iremonger, who, it is believed, has the power to bring the mighty Umbitt down. But all around the city, things, everyday things, are twitching into life...

The witty and entrancing story of a young woman trapped in a ramshackle English playhouse—and the mysterious figure who threatens the its very survivalThe year is 1901. England’s beloved queen has died, and her aging son has finally taken the throne. In the eastern city of Norwich, bright and inquisitive young Edith Holler spends her days among the boisterous denizens of the Holler Theatre, warned by her domineering father that the playhouse will literally tumble down if she should ever leave its confines. Fascinated by tales of the city she knows only from afar, she decides to write a play of her a stage adaptation of the legend of Mawther Meg, a monstrous figure said to have used the blood of countless children to make the local delicacy known as Beetle Spread. But when her father suddenly announces his engagement to a peculiar, imposing woman named Margaret Unthank, heir to the actual Beetle Spread fortune, Edith scrambles to protect her father, the theatre, and her play—the one thing that’s truly hers—from the newcomer’s sinister designs.Teeming with unforgettable characters and illuminated by the author’s trademark fantastical illustrations, Edith Holler is a surprisingly modern fable of one young woman’s struggle to escape her family’s control—and to reveal inconvenient truths about the way children are used.

The delightfully macabre, astonishingly original trilogy reaches its thrilling conclusion The dirt town of Foulsham has been destroyed, its ashes still smoldering. Darkness lies heavily over the city, the sun has not come up for days, and inside the houses of people throughout the capital, ordinary objects have begun to move. Strange new people run through the darkened streets. There are rumours of a terrible contagion. From the richest mansion to the poorest slum people have disappeared. The police have been instructed to carry arms. And rats―there are rats everywhere. Someone has stolen a certain plug. Someone is lighting a certain box of matches. All will come tumbling down. The Iremongers are in London. PRAISE FOR HEAP HOUSE , BOOK 1 IN THE IREMONGER TRILOGY A New York Times Notable Book A Kirkus Reviews "Best Teen Book of 2014"A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Publishers Weekly Indie Big Books from Small Presses An NPR Best Book of 2014 “ Heap House is weird, yes. Spectacularly so.” ― THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Whimsically gothic.” ― LOS ANGELES TIMES “ Heap House is the first volume in the Iremonger Trilogy, and its cliffhanger ending is perfectly maddening. It's cruel, really, of the publisher to release just one.” ― NEWSDAY “Full of strange magic, sly humor, and odd, melancholy characters, this trilogy opener, peppered with portraits illustrated by Carey in a style reminiscent of Peake’s own, should appeal to ambitious readers seeking richly imagined and more-than-a-little-sinister fantasy.” ― PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW) “Channels Dickens crossed with Lemony Snicket. . . . A Gothic tale in turns witty, sweet, thoughtful and thrilling―but always off-kilter―and penned with gorgeous, loopy prose. Suspense and horror gradually accumulate into an avalanche of a climax. . . . Magnificently creepy.” ― KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW)

Identical twin sisters who live in the city of Entralla, the reclusive Irva and the adventurous Alva cannot survive without each other, feeling each other's emotions and thinking each other's thoughts, as they construct a model of the city on a scale that will accommodate the desires of both sisters. By the author of Observatory Mansions. 25,000 first printing.

'I blame the pencil. I hadn't meant to do it. I wasn't thinking. It just happened that way.'In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey published a sketch on social media with a plan to keep posting a drawing a day from his family home in Austin, Texas, until life returned to normal. One hundred and fifty pencil stubs later, he was still drawing.Carey's hand moved with world events, chronicling pandemic and politics. It reached into the past, taking inspiration from history, and escaped grim reality through flights of vivid imagination and studies of the natural world. The drawings became a way of charting time, of moving forward, and maintaining connection at a time of isolation.This remarkable collection of words and drawings from the acclaimed author of Little and The Swallowed Man charts a tumultuous year in pencil, finding beauty amid the horror of extraordinary times.

La favola dickensiana nata dalla fantasmagoria di Edward Carey viene qui proposta in un unico volume che raccoglie l'intera trilogia, I segreti di Heap House, Foulsham e Lombra.Clod è un Iremonger. Vive tra un mare di oggetti gettati via o smarriti che provengono da tutti gli angoli di Londra. E al centro di questo mare c'è una casa, Heap House, un insieme di tetti, torrette, comignoli, parti di edifici smantellati con i loro misteri, raccolti per tutta la città e fusi in un labirinto vivo di scale, saloni, angoli nascosti. E gli Iremonger hanno una ciascuno di loro è legato, sin dalla nascita, a un oggetto. Ma Cold ha una caratteristica può udire i sussurri degli oggetti.

“Disegno sempre. Adoro disegnare. Il disegno è una fuga e un modo per calmarmi. È un modo per pensare. Alla matita ti consegni. Hai un’idea in testa su quello che potresti disegnare e la matita cerca di tradurre i tuoi pensieri sulla carta. Spesso la matita ha le sue opinioni, va dove vuole ed è meglio che tu la assecondi.”Trovandosi costretto in casa per la pandemia Edward Carey decide di fare almeno un disegno al giorno in un tentativo di esorcizzare e sopportare meglio la situazione in cui si trova. Comincia così un viaggio durato ben oltre il lockdown, un’abitudine salutare per l’autore che, al disegno – rigorosamente a matita di tipo B –, alterna riflessioni e pensieri sulle situazioni e i motivi che hanno ispirato le sue creazioni, parlandoci così dell’attualità e del mondo che cambia. Ben 500 giorni e 500 illustrazioni per raccontare, con leggerezza e intelligenza, ciò che abbiamo vissuto.