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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
The Cat
After the sudden death of his owner, the Cat finds himself abandoned without food in an unfurnished house. Initially he consorts with his old friends, Mouse and Rat -- one addicted to cheese and philosophy, the other to flashy Italian suits and style -- but gradually he gives way to his normal cat-like urges. At first guilty, then elated at his new freedom and its beneficial impact on the other residents, the Cat falls prey to a new and troubling vision of how the house might be with more initiative and enterprise -- and more discipline for the likes of Mouse and Rat. Gradually the Cat unleashes new forces onto the house and the gardens beyond, achieving ever-greater things, except that, as he does so, he finds himself more and more alone. Based on the classic themes of love and friendship, of outsider and insider, of eating to live and living to eat, of substance and style, loyalty and betrayal, leadership, ambition, and domination, the book follows the Cat to his final home.
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 Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy
The latest volume in the Dedalus European fantasy series, this anthology of short stories includes a wide range of texts covering the period from nineteenth century until today. The richness and diversity of the stories reflects the long tradition of fantasy in Finnish literature, ranging from the classics to experimental literature, from satire to horror. This is the first collection of Finnish short stories of its kind and almost all are translated into English for the first time.
En Route
None
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. '
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.
