'A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free.
'When Winona Dalloway begins her day — in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet’, wake up — she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.
'On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices — a mind both wild and precise.
'And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …' (Publication summary)
'Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, this novella explores coercive control.'
'A storm is brewing, both literal and metaphoric, in “the suburbs of the east”. In a burst of poetic and darkly humorous prose, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead unleashes the turbulent interior life of its protagonist, Winona Dalloway, onto the page.'
'A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.' (Introduction)
'A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.' (Introduction)
'A storm is brewing, both literal and metaphoric, in “the suburbs of the east”. In a burst of poetic and darkly humorous prose, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead unleashes the turbulent interior life of its protagonist, Winona Dalloway, onto the page.'
'Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, this novella explores coercive control.'
