Dancing with Mermaids explained

Dancing with Mermaids
Author:Miles Gibson
Country:United Kingdom
Language:English
Publisher:Heinemann (UK)
E. P. Dutton (US)
Pub Date:1985 (first edition)
Media Type:Print
Pages:195 p.
Isbn:0434291315
Oclc:12804793

Dancing With Mermaids is the second novel by the English writer Miles Gibson. The novel includes elements of magic realism and erotica.

Plot

The novel is set in the secluded fishing village of Rams Horn, once a fashionable Regency spa, at the mouth of the River Sheep, somewhere on the Dorset coast. Rams Horn is described by the author as ‘a memory, a lost cause, a carnival of ghosts, an ark of half-forgotten dreams’. The Financial Times described the setting as a secretive place ‘full of leery, venal, outsize, hideous and beautiful people’ .

Publication History

First published by William Heinemann, London, 1985. . First US edition published by EP Dutton 1986. Reprinted in the UK by the Do Not Press 1997.

Reception

The New Yorker described the novel as ‘a wild, funny, poetic exhalation that sparkles and hoots and flies’.[1]

References

  1. "Briefly Noted", The New Yorker, July 13, 1987, p. 89