Editions

Mr Fortune's Maggot

Mr Fortune's Maggot

RELEASED 04/01/2021

After three years on the remote tropical island of Fanua, Timothy Fortune, a missionary from London, has made little headway. The islanders show very little interest in Christianity and he has only a single convert: a boy, Lueli. As Mr Fortune's affections for both Lueli and his new island home deepen, he begins to question all his old certainties - until one day he is put to a terrible test.

A wry exploration of faith, colonialism and the demands of love, Mr Fortune's Maggot is as quietly subversive as it is delightful.

Reviews

  • Original, elegant and hypnotically strange

    Miranda Seymour, The New York Times

  • At long last I pulled down from its place on the shelves Sylvia Townsend Warner's plump little novel impishly titled Mr. Fortune's Maggot and was once again amazed by what a witty, poetic, clairvoyant writer this English woman was

    John Updike

  • Mr. Fortune's Maggot is satire at its best. There are passages here - particularly those delightfully malicious ones, of which there are many - that still cause the reader to laugh out loud. There is so much truth here

    Anthony Slide

  • Sylvia Townsend Warner pursues the psychology of the story with beautiful accuracy

    John Carey

  • Her writing is full of melodic skills... Her sentences move like talk between intimates. Perhaps that is why this quizzical tale is so intensely moving

    Gillian Beer, New Statesman

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