Language English Pages 448 (paperback) Originally published 25 March 1993 Preceded by King Solomon's Carpet Country United Kingdom | Publication date March 25, 1993 ISBN 0-14-017661-6 Followed by No Night Is Too Long Genres Crime Fiction, Mystery | |
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Publisher Viking (UK)
Harmony (US) Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) & Audiobook Similar Ruth Rendell books, Crime Fiction books | ||
Asta's Book is a 1993 novel by British writer Ruth Rendell, written under the name Barbara Vine. It was published in the USA under the title Anna's Book.
Plot summary
This is set in the 1990s, with flashbacks to 1905 via Asta's diary. Asta and her husband Rasmus have come to east London from Denmark with their two sons and a third child on the way. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing her diary. She continued the diary through the decades until 1967. These diaries were later discovered, translated and published by her daughter over seventy years later, to international acclaim. But they reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal, for they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder, to the quest for a missing child and to the enigma surrounding Asta's daughter, Swanny. It falls to Asta's granddaughter Ann to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.