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THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD
‘Tragic and comic at the same time… an outrageous story, one that will break your heart’ Sunday Independent
‘A terrific story, grippingly told’ Sunday Times
‘I read The Glass Castle straight through in an evening, wearing an expression of slack-jawed amazement’ Spectator
While Jeannette Walls was living on Park Avenue, covering the Academy Awards and attending black-tie parties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her parents were squatting in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side.
Rex Walls, her father, was an ingenious adventurer and a hopeless alcoholic. Her mother was an artist who abhorred domestic routine and the chores of motherhood: ‘Why should I cook a meal that will be gone in an hour when I can do a painting that will last forever?’ Funny sad, quirky and loving, The Glass Castle is an almost incredible story of a nomadic, impoverished childhood.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING BRIE LARSON, WOODY HARRELSON AND NAOMI WATTS
‘Tragic and comic at the same time… an outrageous story, one that will break your heart’ Sunday Independent
‘A terrific story, grippingly told’ Sunday Times
‘I read The Glass Castle straight through in an evening, wearing an expression of slack-jawed amazement’ Spectator
While Jeannette Walls was living on Park Avenue, covering the Academy Awards and attending black-tie parties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her parents were squatting in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side.
Rex Walls, her father, was an ingenious adventurer and a hopeless alcoholic. Her mother was an artist who abhorred domestic routine and the chores of motherhood: ‘Why should I cook a meal that will be gone in an hour when I can do a painting that will last forever?’ Funny sad, quirky and loving, The Glass Castle is an almost incredible story of a nomadic, impoverished childhood.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING BRIE LARSON, WOODY HARRELSON AND NAOMI WATTS
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Reviews
There isn't a shred of self-pity in this deeply compassionate book
Like J.D. Salinger or Hemingway before her, Jeannette Walls has the talent of knowing exactly how to let a story tell itself
Funny and brilliantly written through a child's eyes, recreating a unique family life
Tragic and comic at the same time... an outrageous story, one that will break your heart
Extraordinary
Wall's journalistic bare-bones style makes for a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect
Each memory is more incredible than the last... That Walls recounts them so well and in such detail is our good fortune
Some people are born storytellers. Some lives are worth telling. The best memoirs happen when these two conditions converge. In The Glass Castle, they have
Affection, shame and guilt run side by side in this unforgettable memoir of a childhood spent ''on the skedaddle''
Utterly engaging and teeming with incident. This is a life so vividly rendered that the reader feels present at every moment
The Glass Castle is the kind of story that keeps you awake long after the rest of the house has fallen asleep
Walls has joined the company of writers such as Mary Karr and Frank McCourt who have been able to transform their sad memories into fine art
'I read The Glass Castle straight through in an evening, wearing an expression of slack-jawed amazement. Jeannette Walls has managed to balance her account with great precision; as she and her siblings did, we must both love and hate her parents
Walls has carved a story with precision and grace out of one of the most chaotic, heart-breaking childhoods... This deeply affecting memoir is a triumph in every possible way, and it does what all good books should: it affirms our faith in the human spirit
A terrific story, grippingly told
Walls has a God-given knack for spinning a yarn, and The Glass Castle is nothing short of spectacular