Roald Dahl - the grand master of the short story - turns his pen to anything, twisting everyday life into powerful, and sometimes terrifying fantasies. Seven superb stories, full of Roald Dahl's usual magic, mystery and suspense: meet the boy who can talk to animals, the man who can see with his eyes closed, and find out about the treasure, buried...
The novel opens in England in 1915, at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragist and one of the first women to integrate Cambridge University. Her decision to starve herself for the cause informs and echoes in the later, overlapping narratives of her descendants. Among them are her daughter Evie, who becomes a professor of chemistry at Barnard College in the middle of the century and never marries...