The Usual Desire to Kill: A Novel

by Camilla Barnes Narrated by Harriet Walter

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Our favorite book families tend to be delightfully dysfunctional, and there’s no one quite like this one. With two sisters, a pair of aging parents and barn animals aplenty, The Usual Desire to Kill is a quirky and heartfelt novel that reminds readers our parents had lives before us.

A “droll, psychologically astute...unexpected...very funny” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air) and moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter.

Miranda's parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of decades-old food.

Miranda's father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda's mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.”

This wry, propulsive story about an eccentric yet endearing family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Praise for The Usual Desire to Kill

"Wickedly delightful... Family secrets emerge, but the plot mostly revolves around the scheduling of a hip replacement. I loved it completely. " —The New York Times Book Review

"Droll, psychologically astute... The constant pleasure of reading The Usual Desire to Kill is Barnes' unexpected language... very funny." —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

"Don't expect premeditated murder, exactly—but there may well be some dialogue sharp enough to draw blood in this tragicomic debut novel." —NPR.org

"Camilla Barnes has crafted a delicious debut." —The Boston Globe

"Empathetic... intimate... Barnes explores long marriage, sibling rivalry, truths behind shifting memories, and family secrets as well as examining the decisions people make in life, the long-term effects of those decisions, and how well one truly knows the people they love." —Booklist, STARRED review

"Playwright Barnes combines humor with pathos in her heart-wrenching debut...the genius of the novel lies in the ways Barnes highlights how parents can never be fully known to their children, no matter how observant their children are... An unforgettable story about the limits of judging others." —Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“I love nothing more than reading about eccentric families, and the family in The Usual Desire to Kill is just that. Miranda and her sister work to uncover the true story of their parents' marriage, only to have their brilliant, quirky mother and father deflect them at every turn. Barnes has written a witty, moving novel about characters who, even when they seem incapable of speaking honestly, are worth listening to nonetheless.” —Ann Napolitano, author of Hello Beautiful and Dear Edward

“Hilarious and heartbreaking, packed with acute and painfully funny observations about relationships and family dynamics. Barnes’s dialogue is pitch-perfect, and her characters dance off the page and straight into your heart. Mum and Dad are magnificent creations, eccentric and endearing, both instantly recognizable and utterly singular.” —Monica Ali, author of Love Marriage and Brick Lane

"In The Usual Desire to Kill, Camilla Barnes deftly deciphers the secret language of one family, often with deeply funny and knowing results. I loved spending time in the very specific, complicated, and memorable world of this novel." —Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion and The Wife

New York Times Book Review

Wickedly delightful… Family secrets emerge, but the plot mostly revolves around the scheduling of a hip replacement.

AudioFile

Walter’s astringent delivery is deadpan funny and so skillfully judged that even the occasional llama in the kitchen seems plausible…It’s mad fun, but also far more than skin deep. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

Kirkus Reviews

2025-02-15
Two women do the best they can with their aging parents, a couple of British academics retired to France.

Though the title sounds like a murder mystery, in this case it refers to a feeling Miranda reports to her sister, Charlotte, by email, during a visit to their parents’ home: “You know what it’s like: the usual desire to kill.” That’s the sisters’ consistent reaction to spending time with their crotchety, ailing, brilliant parents (and their llamas, Lollo and Leonora). The portraits of Dad and Mum, delivered in the first person by actress/playwright Miranda, are the highlights of playwright Barnes’ fiction debut, along with the ongoing banter volleyed among all the characters. The book also includes emails between the sisters, letters written in the 1960s to someone named Kitty by “Your Loving Sister,” and a small number of sections written in the third person covering developments Miranda is not privy to. The book delights in arcane family rituals, code names, and practices: “doing the ducks”; characters referred to as DK (Dog Killer) and HQ (Headquarters); an apparently fictional sibling named James; the horrors of a finally retired chest freezer named Boswell, which was moved to France from England along with all its contents; a host of shared literary references, from Epictetus to Kipling, Shakespeare to Stevie Smith. Mum’s impending hip replacement surgery, to be performed in Paris, is the closest thing the book has to a plot—it occasions a gathering of all five family members, including Miranda’s 19-year-old daughter, Alice, at the parents’ home, where a few remaining mysteries are cleared up. Higher stakes would not have been a bad idea; as it is, the reader waits for something to knock these characters out of their patterns of humoring and needling and misunderstanding each other and it just doesn’t come, making for a melancholy denouement.

As long as you don’t get the idea that anyone’s going to change, you’ll be charmed.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193810520
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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