"Kennedy is not only a romantic but an anarchist." --Anita Brookner
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.
A modern upstairs-downstairs comedy with an old-fashioned morality play
tucked away inside, The Feast is sly, kaleidoscopic, and utterly
ingenious, a novel that only Margaret Kennedy could have written.