Great Granny Webster cover art

Great Granny Webster

Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Great Granny Webster

By: Caroline Blackwood, John Banville - introduction
Narrated by: Rose Robinson
Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £17.94

Pre-order Now for £17.94

About this listen

Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece, shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - a gothic family drama in miniature

In her gloomy mausoleum of a home, the terrifying matriarch Great Granny Webster spends her days sitting bolt upright in a Victorian chair, entirely alone except for her one-eyed maid - and her orphaned great-granddaughter, sent to stay for the sea air. She presides over three generations of ill-fated women, and a twisted family history which spools back through hedonistic 20s London to a crumbling aristocratic pile where two children are kept silently hidden in a distant wing.

This macabre, viciously funny, partly autobiographical novel cuts to the bone of a dysfunctional dynasty, and captures Blackwood at her pitch-black best.

'One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived' Virginia Feito
'Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith' Araminta Hall
'Idiosyncratic, dark and extremely funny' Lucy Scholes
'Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's best book. In the monstrous old dowager of Hove, and the ruling class she represents, Blackwood found a subject grandly commensurate with her own extraordinary style of aghast relish' Jonathan Raban
'A unique literary experience' Philip Larkin
'Great Granny Webster feels more like a memoir than a novel...but it is as gripping as a whodunit' TLS
'Full of genuine black humour' London Review of Books©2026 Caroline Blackwood Estate
Classics Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Funny
No reviews yet