The Porpoise

Mark Haddon has written a terrifically exciting novel called “The Porpoise.” Could we just stop there? Almost anything else I say about this book risks scattering readers like startled birds. Indeed, if Haddon weren’t the author of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” I would have dart......more

Now Nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize 2019 This book is Haddon's contribution to the already pretty vast canon of reworkings of the Appolinus / Apollonius tale - illustrous authors like Gower, Wilkins and Shakespeare already took the ancient Greek material and remixed it, always slightly changing th......more

I finished this strange novel a few days ago and I still don't know what to make of it. Maybe Mark Haddon is trying his best to distance himself from The Curious Incident - his subsequent works have all been wildly different. This might be his most unusual effort to date. It begins with a plane crash......more

The Porpoise starts off with the tale of a widowed father raising his daughter after his wife is killed in an airplane crash. At first, all seems well, but soon it becomes apparent that there is something off about the relationship between father and daughter. In comes a young man named Darius who d......more

The Porpoise is by far Mark Haddon's strangest and most unique novel, and that's exactly what I loved about it. From the beginning, you are launched head first into the action which is quite a shock to the system. It is apparently inspired by Pericles, Prince of Tyre, written in part by Shakespeare,......more