Books by Rachel Ingalls

The amphibious cult classic: a magical tale of a suburban housewife's affair with a frogman ...'Disturbing but seductive ... Wonderful.' Margaret Atwood'Perfect.' Max Porter'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James'A feminist masterpiece: tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado''Genius ... A broadcast from a stranger and more dazzling dimension.' Patricia Lockwood'Genius ... Like Revolutionary Road written by Franz Kafka ... Exquisite.' The Times'Incredibly liberates readers from the awfulness of convention to a state where weirdness and otherness are beautiful.' Sarah Hall'A devastating fable of mythic proportions ... Wondrously peculiar.' Irenosen Okojie (foreword)Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic, Larry the frogman is a revelation - and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams ... Rachel Ingalls's Mrs Caliban is a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago'A miracle . A perfect novel.' New Yorker'Every one of its 125 pages is perfect ... Clear a Saturday, please, and read it in a single sitting.' Harper'sWhat Readers Are Saying:'Maybe the most gorgeous, lyrical book ever written'*****'A fantastic wee novel, strange and brilliant, and absolutely the inspiration for The Shape of Water.'*****'Wonderful, sharp minimal prose offers big truths. Superb - brilliant, in fact.'*****'Absolutely incredible. It's weird, funny, and heartbreaking, like a Richard Yates novel except with lizardman sex.'*****'One of the best tongue-in-cheek social satires that I've ever read. It delves into gender politics. It takes a long, hard look at mental health. It addresses female sexual freedom and agency. It asks the reader to examine what it means to be human ... Genius.'*****'Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies that examines sad realities with hilarious verve ... Sometimes you need a sexy frog person to break you out of the ties that bind. '*****'Hooked me so deeply I picked it up and finished it the same night ... Beautiful ... Will stay with me.'*****'What the hell just happened?'*****

'Every volume [Rachel Ingalls] has written displays the craft of a quite remarkable talent. Tales of love, terror, betrayal and grief, which others would spin out for hundreds of pages, are given the occluded force of poetry.' Amanda Craig, IndependentRachel Ingalls (b. 1940) grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has lived in London since 1965. The title-piece in this collection, first published in 1974, is the novella The Man Who Was Left Behind, which tells of a retired lawyer from the American South whose entire family has been destroyed. His grief drives him to haunt the bars, parks and laundromats of the town where he was once a respected citizen. The accompanying stories 'St. George and the Nighclub' and 'Something to Write Home About' are both set on the island of Rhodes, and both offer disquieting portraits of marriage.

'Rachel Ingalls writes the kind of macabre, fantastic and haunting fiction called American Gothic... Its antecedents lie not in the hysterical 18th-century rebellion against reason, but in Jacobean tragedy, and in the complicated American relations with greed and Puritanism. Ingalls is one of the most brilliant practitioners of this Gothic since Poe... Black Diamond is a collection of five short stories, loosely linked by the theme of kinship. Ghoulish and gripping, they all begin in an atmosphere of unsophisticated tranquillity...' Amanda Craig, Independent'The stories in Black Diamond... wrap themselves insidiously around your curiosity, and draw you with them.' Sunday Times'[Ingalls'] vision evokes a world where psychosis and extreme violence stalk the American dream.' Time Out

'Every volume [Rachel Ingalls] has written displays the craft of a quite remarkable talent. Tales of love, terror, betrayal and grief, which others would spin out for hundreds of pages, are given the occluded force of poetry.' Amanda Craig, IndependentRachel Ingalls (b. 1940) grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has lived in London since 1965. Theft, her literary debut, won the Authors' Club First Novel Award for 1970.'Theft is a parable-parallel taking place in some dehumanizing, militarized society where Seth, a starving working man, is jailed for stealing a loaf of bread. In prison with him is a manic-messiah, a wife-killer, some affluent youngsters doing their 'mental slumming' via protest, and his protective, smarter brother-in-law.' Kirkus Review 'Imaginative and intelligent'. Sunday Times 'Tautly told with great power.' Sunday Mirror

The Pearlkillers, first published in 1986, is a collection of four novellas: 'Third Time Lucky', 'People to People', 'Captain Hendrik's Story', and 'Inheritance', the action of which gives the volume its title. '[Rachel Ingalls'] characters all bear the mark of Cain: They are innocents (no matter that some may be killers) who are swept along through tepid, flat circumstances until suddenly all hell breaks loose, and the Furies erupt to claim their prey... In her best work, Ingalls is as monochromatic as Edgar Allan Poe, going straight to her target with the same ease and surety as an arrow skims to its bull's-eye... And just as Poe's craft was exactly suited to the conventions of the short story form, so Ingalls' vision is exactly suited to the length and scope of the novella... Like Poe, Rachel Ingalls is more than a master storyteller: She is also a superb artist.' Los Angeles Times

Academic anthropologist Stan Binstead is headed off to East Africa on sabbatical. Adulterous by nature, he's irked when his wife Millie asks to accompany him. But as the couple pass through London the balance of power in their marriage begins, strangely, to shift - a transformation that becomes yet more pronounced on safari. Sometimes considered by critics as a variation on the themes of Hemingway's 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macombe', Binstead's Safari was first published in 1983. 'The tone of the novel deepens into a psychological study of these two people and the subtle and complex ways in which the exotic environment works upon each of them... Ingalls' style maintains the wry grace of a sophisticated romance, a control guaranteeing that the denouement will not only be inevitable but astonishing.' Elaine Kendall, Los Angeles Times