Crustaceans - Rilegato

Cowan, Andrew

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0340713054 ISBN 13: 9780340713051

Casa editrice: Sceptre, 2000

Riassunto

On his son's sixth birthday, Paul begins to tell Euan a story. He recalls the boy's birth, his first words and steps and his mother. He also remembers his own mother's death and his father's refusal to explain it. It soon becomes evident however, that Euan is not in the car.

Su questo libro

Recensione

Cowan has excelled himself with this brilliant and poignant book (Lucy McDonald, Sunday Express)

'Immensely powerful' The Bookseller

'Andrew Cowan tackles the big subjects of love and loss, working backwards and forwards from the still, shocked point of a child's death and constructing a book that is unremitting but rewarding...The book begins and ends in wintry east-coast light but keeps alive the hope of human contact and warmth' Stephen Blanchard, Time Out

Riveting ... Andrew Cowan conveys the experience of loss with an extraordinary, aching precision (Alan Mahar, Literary Review)

Haunting and heartbreaking ... Cowan's beautifully compact writing keenly evokes absence, the delineation of which has been known to elude the finest authors (Sunday Times)

'Andrew Cowan takes a risk with this quietly audacious first-person narrative of love and loss...the life story he addresses directly to his five-year-old son, Euan, is told with a tenderness and detail that shine through all his dark domestic secrets. CRUSTACEANS is a bleakly beautiful novel...The carefully weighted prose, with a firm physicality and groundedness of detail reminiscent of early Seamus Heaney, takes us back and forth through the narrator's messy personal history...Although a grimmer story than Cowan's COMMON GROUND (1996), CRUSTACEANS marks a significant advance. It is a mature novel with a disturbing dramatic charge. In the last fifty pages, the solving of family mysteries brings us to the suspended conclusion - we discover what happened to Euan at the seaside. This is what all the authorial control was leading up to: a fine ending to a riveting, if harrowing, read. Andrew Cowan conveys the experience of loss with an extraordinary, aching precision' Alan Mahar, Literary Review

'CRUSTACEANS is a sustained reflection on fatherhood which considers the emotional alienation of modern men. It is about loneliness and living in a shell that cannot be pierced, being shut off in a private world which others (especially women) are unable to reach...Cowan's success in delivering a fully realized imaginative experience marks him out as a serious writer...it confirms Andrew Cowan's reputation' Sara Hudston, TLS

An elegant and impressive novel (James Robertson, Scotland on Sunday)

'Subtly written and superbly crafted CRUSTACEANS has none of the normal traits of a tear-jerker novel - instead Cowan executes the novel with seemingly impossible constraint...Cowan has excelled himself with this brilliant and poignant book which will be devoured by anyone who has ever lost a loved one themselves' Lucy McDonald, Sunday Express

''As a study of how people are made by their pasts - elements of which they then visit on their own children - CRUSTACEANS is quiet, touching and intelligent, and moves to its conclusion with grace even amid despair...a sombre but elegant and impressive novel' James Robertson, Scotland on Sunday

L'autore

Andrew Cowan was born in Corby and is the author of two previous novels, PIG and COMMON GROUND (Michael Joseph/Penguin). He is a graduate of the University of East Anglia Creative Writing course, and lives in Norwich with the writer Lynne Bryan and their daughter.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Sceptre
• Data di pubblicazione: 2000
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0340713054
• ISBN 13: 9780340713051
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 191
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile