The Hearing Trumpet

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic.

Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work.

The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby .