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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
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...
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. '
En Route
None
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.
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.
Mobius Dick
In MOBIUS DICK, physicist John Ringer, receives a mysterious text message that triggers an investigation into the development of new mobile phone technology in a research facility outside a remote Scottish village. Already the world is becoming a very different place: amnesia, telepathy, false memory and inexplicable coincidences all seem to be occurring more frequently with humorous, brain teasing results. Could quantum experiments have caused the collapse of our universe’s space-time continuum? Could the multi layered text we are reading come from another world altogether? ‘Crumey is one of my three or four favourite modern writers - a wise, funny, alert and original novelist who has n...
