From your bestselling, Man Booker-shortlisted writer of The Sisters Brothers, comes an excellent and boisterous book that reimagines the folk tale.

A love story, an adventure story, a fable without a moral, and an ink-black comedy of manners, Undermajordomo Minor is Patrick deWitt’s long-awaited follow-up to the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Sisters Brothers.

Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the citizen unusual duck in the bucolic hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, about Undermajordomo Minor: A Novel young and aimless, Lucy is usually a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for generating brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts work helping the Majordomo from the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux.

While maintaining his fresh post as Undermajordomo, Lucy quickly discovers the place harbors many dark secrets, not least of which is the whereabouts of the castle’s professional, Baron Von Aux. He also encounters the multi-colored people of the neighborhood village-thieves, madmen, aristocrats, and Klara, a sensitive beauty whose love he must compete for using the extremely good-looking soldier, Adolphus. Thus begins an account of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, home mystery, and cold-blooded murder where every aspect of individual behavior is certainly laid bare for our hero to see.

Undermajordomo Minor is an experience, a secret, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behavior, but most importantly it is a like tale and Lucy should be careful, for like is a violent factor.