num_pages: 240
description: Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling. Moving across a blurred European landscape -- from rural poverty and drunken mayhem of the port to the Mediterranean rave scene -- we experience everything from Morvern's stark, unflinching perspective.Morvern is utterly hypnotizing from her very first sentence to her last. She rarely goes anywhere without the Walkman left behind as a Christmas present by her dead boyfriend, and as she narrates this strange story, she takes care to tell the reader exactly what music she is listening to, giving the stunning effect of a sound track running behind her voice.In much the same way that Patrick McCabe managed to tell an incredibly rich and haunting story through the eyes of an emotionally disturbed boy in The Butcher Boy , Alan Warner probes the vast internal emptiness of a generation by using the cool, haunting voice of a female narrator lost in the profound anomie of the ecstasy generation. Morvern is a brilliant creation, not so much memorable as utterly unforgettable.
language: English
title: Morvern Callar
titlecomplete: Morvern Callar (Morvern Callar Cycle, #1)
characters: Morvern Callar
genres: Fiction, Crime, British Literature, Music, Scotland, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, 20th Century, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 4116
places: Argyll, Scotland, Oban, Argyll, Scotland
series: Morvern Callar Cycle
awards: awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Whitbread Award
category: First Novel, awardedAt: 820483200000
name: Somerset Maugham Award, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: Dublin Literary Award
category: Shortlist
publisher: Vintage Books