Quilt

(Paperback, 2nd edition)

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Description

Nicholas Royle's highly praised debut novel recalls David Mitchell's lyrical bravado: in a world where our very language is being appropriated by advertising, propaganda and whatever new technologies can do to mangle it, Royle asserts that the novel has to survive by adapting, staying fresh-and undergoing bizarre metamorphoses. Quilt confronts the mad hand of grief while embracing the endless possibilities of language. Tender, absorbing and at times shockingly funny, this extraordinary novel is both mystery and love story. His challenge to and experiments with literary form forge a new mode of storytelling that is both playful and inquisitive. He sets about the mundane yet exhausting process of sorting through the remnants of his father's life - clearing away years of accumulated objects, unearthing forgotten memories and the haunted realms of everyday life. At the same time, he embarks on an eccentric side-project. And as he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project, his grip on reality seems to slip.

Reviews

'I read Quilt with admiration - it's a work of remarkable imaginative energy.' - Frank Kermode ; 'A book of mythological power. Quilt is unforgettable, like all those great pieces of fiction that are fed by our immemorial root system, the human dream of metamorphosis.' - Helene Cixous; 'A lexical celebration and a psychological conundrum... Royle explores loss and alienation perceptively and inventively.' - The Guardian; 'It is in those commonplace moments at the end of a life... moments which Nicholas Royle describes with such piercing accuracy, when this novel is truly at its strangest.' - TLS; 'The way the storyline ultimately develops takes the breath away.' - The New Statesman; `Royle's baroque, athletic prose... confers a strong sense of the "strangeness" of English... moments of delightfully eccentric humour and impressive linguistic experimentalism.' - The Observer; `An experimental and studied look at mourning. Playful, clever and perceptive.' - The Big Issue; `It is quiet, lapidary, and teases out the tangled filaments that link insight to feeling with the unnerving stealth of a submarine predator.' - Will Self.

Author Bio

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is also the author of An English Guide to Birdwatching (`Rachel Cusk rewritten by Georges Bataille, full of strange sex, sudden violence and surreal twists' FT) and numerous books about literature and literary theory, including The Uncanny and This Thing Called Literature.