The Vinegar Jar
The Vinegar Jar is now available as an e-book published by Billyworks. Click here to order from Amazon UK
Doherty… delights, surprises, disturbs and moves the reader… with admirable finesse.
Time Out
The novel is compelling as an account of the dangerous development of a compensatory imagination.
The Times Literary Supplement
Doherty’s novel has a strange hypnotic strength and dramatises powerfully the dangers of blurring the boundaries between fantasy and reality.
Sunday Times
Rose Doran lay as naked as a peach on top of her bed and watched the moth that fluttered its dark and dusty wings down the wall. Maybe, she thought, Paedric will hear its whispery strumming between her room and his and think of her before sleep takes over. She closed her eyes and imagined the moth’s lips brushing like velvet along her flesh.
The Vinegar Jar is my second novel for adults and is probably the most adventurous book I’ve written, in that its subject is the power of the imagination, the dangerous liaison between story and the truth. The central character Rose Doran uses story to transcend the unspeakable tedium of her life, and finds that she can enter into the imaginings of her strange neighbour, Paedric. Together they create an imaginary child, but the consequences are untenable. The dark journeys of fairy stories were certainly my inspiration for this novel.
Foreign editions
Click here for details of foreign editions of The Vinegar Jar.
