An ingenious, upstairs-downstairs tragicomedy that unfolds like a thriller, set at a doomed seaside resort in Postwar England.
Summer, 1947. A bizarre catastrophe rocks a seaside village in Cornwall when a cliff tumbles down on the Pendizack Manor Hotel. The hotel is obliterated, and seven guests are killed in the disaster. Everyone else makes a narrow escape. As the survivors tell their stories, the events of the previous week are revealed, and a parade of sins exposed. Gluttony, Lecherousness, Sloth, Pride, Covetousness, Envy and Wrath: all are in residence at Pendizack Manor, and as the day of the disaster creeps closer, it becomes clear that who’s spared and who’s lost might not be as arbitrary as first assumed.
With the rich characterization of a classic Victorian novel and the pacing of psychological thriller,
The Feast
is sly, kaleidoscopic, and utterly ingenious: a novel that only Margaret Kennedy could have written.