It is Christmas Day, 1885, and the Edgeworths are at each other's throats again. Duncan holds his wife and children captive to his authoritarian whims; every day brings fresh struggles for power. Before breakfast is over, there will be presents in the fire. When illness strikes the family, volatile tensions are unleashed that result in scandal, adultery and murder, while a crowd of gossiping neighbours watches gleefully on. A brutally funny demolition of patriarchal authority, A House and Its Head confirms Ivy Compton-Burnett's status as one of the unique stylists of twentieth-century English fiction, and its greatest chronicler of the violent dysfunction of families.

"Compton-Burnett anatomised primal emotions in a genteel arena: there are shades of Jane Austen here, as well as Pinter and Muriel Spark, but she remains entirely original - funny, shocking, horribly true" - Guardian

"She is as much part of our great twentieth-century fictional heritage as Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen... She writes wonderfully, giving her often ghastly characters mordantly witty lines worthy of Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde" - Guardian

"Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life" - Daily Telegraph

"Absolutely sui generis... Her remorseless humor and savagery are a unique cocktail. There's no middle ground with this novelist-you're either bewildered by her or you become an addict" - BOMB

"A remarkable and unusual novelist, who has, in her own well-tilled field, no rival and no parallel" - TLS

"Darkly acerbic critiques" - Vogue