Wow! eBook
The Blue Book
Author(s): A.L. Kennedy (Author)
- Publisher: Jonathan Cape
- Publication Date: 4 Aug. 2011
- Language: English
- Print length: 384 pages
- ISBN-10: 0224091409
- ISBN-13: 9780224091404
Book Description
Elizabeth Barber is crossing the Atlantic by liner with her perfectly adequate boyfriend, Derek, who might be planning to propose. In fleeing the UK – temporarily – Elizabeth may also be in flight from her past and the charismatic Arthur, once her partner in what she came to see as a series of crimes. Together they acted as fake mediums, perfecting the arcane skills practised by effective frauds.
Elizabeth finally rejected what once seemed an intoxicating game. Arthur continued his search for the right way to do wrong. He now subsidises free closure for the traumatised and dispossessed by preying on the super-rich. The pair still meet occasionally, for weekends of sexual oblivion, but their affection lacerates as much as it consoles.
She hadn’t, though, expected the other man on the boat. As her voyage progresses, Elizabeth’s past is revealed, codes slowly form and break as communication deepens. It’s time for her to discover who are the true deceivers and who are the truly deceived.
What’s more, is the book itself – a fiction which may not always be lying – deceiving the reader? Offering illusions and false trails, magical numbers and redemptive humour, this is a novel about what happens when we are misled and when we are true: an extraordinarily intricate and intimate journey into our minds and hearts undertaken by a writer of great gifts – a maker of wonders.
Editorial Reviews
Review
`Kennedy is a fine stylist and single passages are exquisite.’ –The Financial Times
`This is a masterful novel, imaginatively crafted, shaped by big, precisely articulated emotion.’ –The Times, Saturday Review
`Kennedy’s sixth novel might move by turns through mystery, love story and comedy of shipboard manners, but its central subject is the transgressive, near-sexual pleasure of passing off fiction as fact.’ –New Statesman
Alex Clark: `as impressively ingenious as a fairground house of mirrors … dramatic, exciting and unpredictable… It sails through the Big Novel Test in that it stays in the mind long after it has been laid down. And there is a powerful magic in that’.
–TLS
`a complex, challenging novel… there’s strong language throughout. At times the tone is chill and distancing but it edges gradually towards a final satisfying sense of empathy and resolution.’
–Daily Express
`an impressive novel’ –Daily Telegraph
‘If you like Kennedy’s work, with its cool wit, spare stylishness, sharp sense of place and world-worn tenderness, then you’ll find all those attributes here’
–Independent on Sunday
`AL Kennedy is almost unique among British novelists for her ability to write fiction that is at once challengingly experimental, luminously beautiful and utterly readable. It helps that she is fiercely observant and very funny…If you want a guide to the rough contradictions of the heart, AL Kennedy is your woman’ –Evening Standard
`It displays all the verbal artistry and emotional force of its predecessor, burrowing deep into the minds of its intense central characters’ –Daily Mail
`offers the pleasures of a work in which form and content dovetail with extraordinary skill, and in which narrative tricks are utilised to enlarge on the theme of deception rather than for the sake of tricksiness itself’ –Sunday Times Magazine
`Structured as a compelling riddle…the marvel lies in how far one person can see into another’ –New Statesman
`the more mysterious elements of the novel’s structure…make the book a giddy pleasure’ –Literary Review
