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  • Published: 18 February 2020
  • ISBN: 9781787330832
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $55.00

Glass Town




The entrancing story of the Brontë sisters’ childhood imaginary world, from the New York Times bestselling graphic novelist

The entrancing story of the Brontë sisters' childhood imaginary world, from the New York Times bestselling graphic novelist.

Four children: Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne have invented a world so real and vivid that they can step right into it. But can reality be enough, when fiction is so enticing? And what happens to an imaginary world when its creators grow up?

Plots are spiralling, characters are getting wildly out of hand, and a great deal of ink is being spilt...

Welcome to Glass Town.

  • Published: 18 February 2020
  • ISBN: 9781787330832
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $55.00

About the author

Isabel Greenberg

Isabel Greenberg is a London-based illustrator and writer. She studied illustration at the University of Brighton. She won the Cape/Comica/Observer graphic short story prize in 2011 with ‘Love in a Very Cold Climate’. Her debut graphic novel, The Enyclopedia of Early Earth, won two Eisner Awards and was a New York Times bestseller.

Also by Isabel Greenberg

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Praise for Glass Town

Glass Town is a book to savour, a captivating mash-up of fact and fantasy, with something wonderful on every page. I loved it.

Sarah Waters

An ingenious intertwining of real life and make believe, Glass Town explores the Brontës’ creative impulse and its effect on their lives. It is the perfect combination of clever, crazy, and just a tiny bit creepy, and will appeal to anyone who has wondered about how imagination shapes us, as well as to card-carrying Brontë fans.

Tracy Chevalier

Magical. Isabel Greenberg's drawings are delightful and her imaginative response to the young Brontës' fantasy lives is touching, funny and perceptive.

Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth

A totally immersive read into the world of the famous Brontë juvenilia, both of the fiction and its creators. The experience of this made-up world is so real, it brings us closer to the family themselves, and you feel like you understand what it was to be a Brontë sibling – gifted, isolated, tragic, and loved. Isabel Greenberg is the only one who could bring us here, having honed a perfect style that feels timeless, dark, and a little otherworldly. Who else but the Brontë children could appreciate that?

Kate Beaton

Glass Town, the graphic novel by Isabel Greenberg, is a wonder. Utterly beautiful, richly imagined - a beautiful vision of the young Brontës and the freedom and expression that imagination brings.

Rowan Coleman

A wild journey: an odysseyA feat of narrative concision that is by turns dreamy, and gritty. If it’s a fantastic comic – and I think that it is – then it’s also one of the best books about the Brontës’ juvenilia ever written.

Rachel Cooke, Observer

Here, Greenberg creates a metatextual fantasy, placing the young [Brontë] siblings directly into their imagined world.

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[A] beautifully drawn graphic novelFrom the vivid artwork to a story as poignant and touching as it is witty, this is an artful, inventive and deeply moving mash-up of fact and fiction.

Charlotte Heathcote, Daily Mirror

The weird and wonderful world of the Brontës is brought to life in beautiful, blazing colourA wonderful book. Greenberg is impressively well-informed about the Brontës, but handles her facts lightly, allowing full power to the beautiful and sensitive images… It’s strange how moving these images are.

Claire Harman, Evening Standard, *Book of the Week*

An intriguing, insightful not-quite-biography of the Brontë which explores both their real and imaginary worlds.

Yvette Huddleston, Yorkshire Post

A tale about the collision between dreamlike places of possibility and constrained lives. None of the Brontë would reach 40. Yet their work still entrances us and Greenberg gives their tangled early creations gripping and generous life.

James Smart, Guardian

MagicalGreenberg’s illustrations are wonderful – witty, uncanny, melancholy and funny, brilliantly capturing the creativity of the hugely gifted Brontës.

Eithne Farry, Sunday Express

Oh, this is good… [Glass Town] is a wonderfully moving exploration of the line between creator and creation. And mortality and immortality, for that matter. It is also another reminder that Greenberg is one of the most singular and imaginative graphic novelists we have.

Teddy Jamieson, Herald Scotland

A vivid foundation story for the great torrent of romantic fiction that was shortly to burst forth.

Strong Words

Glass Town is a vivid historical fiction following the lives of the Brontë family… [Greenberg] gracefully moves in and out of the Brontë dreamworldGlass Town might provide a kind of meta-escapism for a moment in time when many of us feel that fiction is brighter than reality.

Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman

Isabel Greenberg has an uncanny gift for the tone of storytelling that makes you feel like you're tucked up safe in bed being told a story by someone with a twinkle in their eye... The art throughout is consistently inventive and engaging, playing with the overlapping of reality and fantasy… The book works on many levels but perhaps the most powerful is the feeling of a child's imagination at work within the heart and mind of a grown genius in grief.

Jenny Robins, Quietus

A brilliant, bonkers tribute to the BrontësIsabel Greenberg has done something extraordinaryGlass Town works so well because while the Brontës’ own story is absolutely devastating, the Glass Town scenes are full of fun… They made their world for the sheer pleasure of making, and that pleasure radiates off Greenberg’s pages too.

Samantha Ellis, Daily Telegraph *****

The Brontës' early stories of fantastical worlds...have been inventively brought to life in this beautiful new graphic novel. There's a poignant edge to the escapism.

Tristram Fane Saunders, Telegraph