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Prague 1938
Prague 1938 is a coming-of-age novel, or a novel of lost illusions, set in a Czechoslovakia threatened with incorporation into the Third Reich. Centred on the 15 year old Guido Hayek, it traces his infatuation with Leah Meisel, an orphaned Jewish girl several years older than him who, he discovers, is part of a street-gang of con-artists and petty thieves. His initiation into their world occurs when Leah challenges him to steal a ring from a jewellers. Soon he is enmeshed. Guido is aware that Leah's grandfather Ezra Meisel, an antiques dealer, has plans to emigrate to Odessa with her, particularly as the Sudeten Crisis comes to a head. Guido's own crisis comes to a head when he discovers tha...
The Failing Heart
'Reading The Failing Heart is like taking a trip; part escape into another consciousness, part suffocating delusion. The story - or rather the scaffolding upon which Smith displays elegant philosophical architecture - follows a young scholar whose mother has just died. Estranged from his father after stealing his money, hounded by the ominous figure of his landlord, and oppressed with images of his ex-lover's impending labour, he wanders into an existential purgatory. "All these open mouths, living or dead, they never shut up." Death is everywhere, through the needs and revulsions of the body, its smells, secretions, drives. The narrative circles in on itself in an ever-decreasing gyre, examining ancient and modern ideas about existence, subjecting philosophical scholarship itself to a sardonic inquiry using its own tools of scrutiny. The writing is self-aware and wry, with rare flashes of humour amid a claustrophobic search for meaning and desire to confess. Time expands and contracts; it is unclear what is real, what is internalised: at the end of this brief novel there is the sensation of having witnessed the dark dream of a stranger.' The Irish Times
En Route
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Primordial Soup
Kate Lester grows up in Florida under the tu telage of her domineering widowed mother, who gives her daug hters an unusual education and a bizarre view of the world. '
Time of the Beast
In the dark ages, Athwold, a young monk, leaves his monastery in disgrace, to seek spiritual redemption by becoming a hermit in the wild expanse of the dismal fenlands. Here he experiences love, desire, and horror, leading him to join the hunt for a brutal and mysterious killer.
The Secret Knowledge
A lost musical masterpiece is at the heart of this gripping intellectual mystery by award-winning writer Andrew Crumey. In 1913 composer Pierre Klauer envisages marriage to his sweetheart and fame for his new work, The Secret Knowledge. Then tragedy strikes. A century later, concert pianist David Conroy hopes the rediscovered score might revive his own flagging career. Music, history, politics and philosophy become intertwined in a multi-layered story that spans a century. Revolutionary agitators, Holocaust refugees and sixties student protesters are counterpointed with artists and entrepreneurs in our own age of austerity. All play their part in revealing the shocking truth that Conroy must...
A Provincial Death
Lyrical and blackly comic, A Provincial Death is a startlingly original meditation on solitude and perseverance, the consolations of art and philosophy, and the capacity of human beings to endure catastrophe. It is a hot, summer morning and Smyth, a struggling writer and academic, wakes to discover he is stranded alone on a rock in the Irish Sea. As he clings on in hope of salvation, he is assailed by broken memories and the failures of his past. Fragmented images of the previous day come to him: a mysterious research institute, a dead forest, a rickety boat captained by a gruff old fisherman, an eccentric academic named McGovern who believed that the Moon was about to crash into the Earth, destroying everything. Confused, weary and sore, and with the tide rising inexorably and strange sea creatures circling, Smyth tries to make sense of an arbitrary world in a desperate bid for survival.
The Khalifah's Mirror
"I have a story to tell you. It is a tale of adventure, of love, and deception, of destiny and death. It is a tale of kings, and emperors, and of beautiful princesses; but also of poets, pirates, and priests. It is a story to entertain and instruct, to stir the blood, to inflame the senses, to dizzy the mind and rouse the soul..." Ismail the Storyteller tells tales of Abu Nuwas, the poet, libertine and spy known as The Father of Locks and his bitter rivalry with a Roman assassin; tales which gradually reveal a shocking betrayal, and culminate in a death which will shock the world. The sequel to The Father of Locks.
Mobius Dick
Mobius Dick is a dazzlingly inventive story that blends techno -thriller, historical fantasy, philosophy and farce, with a cast of characters that includes composers. scientists, geniuses and madmen. Beneath its gripping plot Mobius Dick traces the history of an idea. Just how real is reality? ' as fiction it is sold plutonium, and unflaggingly enjoyable' The Sunday Times 'I have a weakness for Andrew Crumey's novels. I call it a weakness because I've noticed that, when reading them in waiting rooms or on trains, people look up angrily whenever I laugh. There's much to laugh at in Mobius Dick. Like a magical conjuror, Crumey keeps all manner of subjects - chaos and coincidence, quantum mecha...
The Runes Have Been Cast
The Runes Have Been Cast is a black comedy of darkest hue about academic and literary life set in Oxford and St Andrews in the early 60s. A tin of alphabet spaghetti brought about Lancelyn's first encounter with the apparently supernatural. Unfortunately it was not to be his last. Runes, ghosts and spaghetti apart, there is much for Lancelyn to be afraid of: the future, women, Critical Theory, sex romps, The Times' crossword puzzle, succubi and creative writing classes. The pages of The Runes Have Been Cast are haunted by M.R. James, Thomas de Quincey, Mr. Raven, St. Ignatius of Loyola, Iron Foot Jack, J.R.R. Tolkien and an anonymous tramp. I do not think that I can have read a novel which makes so many references to actual works that I have never heard off. With a fairly complex plot, ghosts popping in and out, strange but colourful academics, much mirth and mockery, two young men too full of themselves, a rampaging sex goddess, lots of interesting books and authors, intertextuality galore, the idea of God as a novelist, immersive literature and Tolkien and his bloody elves, this book is a thoroughly enjoyable read. -John Alvey in The Modern Novel
