The Seed Collectors - Tapa dura

The Seed Collectors is entrancing: it's a sharply observed contemporary novel of real people and real plants and real desire and real hurt, and it's somehow also one of the sharpest fantasies I've encountered. A sour-and-sweet delight -- NEIL GAIMAN You won't read a livelier tale about sex, death and out-of-body experiences all year * * SUNDAY TIMES * * Simultaneously sharply-drawn and dreamlike, often hilarious, The Seed Collectors is a baroque family saga of human fallibility, love, eccentricity, sex, spirituality, and of a lost, legendary, coincidentally lethal route to absolute transcendence. Scarlett Thomas is a splendid novelist -- WILLIAM GIBSON Her prose is splendidly alive, full of unexpected phrases and delicious cadences... like Pratchett, Thomas blends her flippancy and her philosophy perfectly. A fantastical family saga * * GUARDIAN * * A delightful compound of fantasy and traditional family saga... a modern fairytale, with flashes that are savagely funny * * THE TIMES * * Scarlett Thomas is one of my favourite writers ever and The Seed Collectors might be her best yet. She fuses the comically everyday with a far-out botanical adventure in ways which are brutally funny and profound all at once. Barbed, casually genius, philosophical and intensely readable. A joy -- MATT HAIG Positively luminous - funny, daring, fizzing with ideas and altogether captivating * * DAILY MAIL * * Thomas has the mesmerising power of a great storyteller * * FINANCIAL TIMES * * [Thomas] is the laureate of the sardonic and the sarcastic. Imagine Muriel Spark's disreputable niece, punky and porny and puncturing every balloon of ego. The novel is outre and extravagant, unremitting and unrepentant, sweet and sour and salty * * SPECTATOR * * Fun and thoughtful * * EMERALD STREET * * Sharp writing and sharper wit * * THE LIST * * This magical family saga will cement Thomas' position at the literary top table * * RED * * A smart and witty family drama, taking in secrets, sex, suicide, celebrity and the meaning of life * * GLAMOUR * * A mindbending novel of family drama * * GOOD HOUSEKEEPING * * How I love her work! * * GRAZIA * * She has woven her distinct brand of mystery and intrigue into a complex family saga * * OBSERVER * * Extremely good fun...riotous, gorgeous, full of flamboyant escapades * * MONOCLE ARTS REVIEW * * A rewarding family saga * * SCOTSMAN * * With each novel, Thomas's ambitions have grown larger, and this is her most sophisticated... in a world of fading wunderkinds, Scarlett Thomas is proving to be the real deal * * CATHOLIC HERALD * *

"I have no idea why everyone thinks nature is so benign and glorious and wonderful. All nature is trying to do is kill us as efficiently as possible." Great Aunt Oleander is dead. To each of her nearest and dearest she has left a seed pod. The seed pods might be deadly, but then again they might also contain the secret of enlightenment. Not that anyone has much time for enlightenment. Fleur, left behind at the crumbling Namaste House, must step into Oleander's role as guru to lost and lonely celebrities. Bryony wants to lose the weight she put on after her botanist parents disappeared, but can't stop drinking. And Charlie struggles to make sense of his life after losing the one woman he could truly love. A complex and fiercely contemporary tale of inheritance, enlightenment, life, death, desire and family trees, The Seed Collectors is the most important novel yet from one of the world's most daring and brilliant writers. As Henry James said of George Eliot's Middlemarch, The Seed Collectors is a 'treasurehouse of detail' revealing all that it means to be connected, to be part of a society, to be part of the universe and to be human.