Quinn: 'Hypnotically beautiful' - Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

(Hardback)

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Description

Quinn is serving a life sentence for a terrible crime committed against the love of his life, Andrea. As the date of his release nears, he receives a letter from an unexpected sender: Andrea's mother Jennifer. To the horror of her local community, she invites Quinn to share her home. What appears a radical act of forgiveness is, however, underpinned by more complex motivations. As they navigate the thorny terrain of guilt, loathing and mutual need that underpins their relationship, Quinn is fighting demons within himself, urges that have always plagued him and threaten to transcend his desire for redemption. Now he must battle to preserve the freedom he longs for, even as the dark voices within threaten to pull him back down... Visceral and compelling, Quinn is a beautifully poetic debut about family, love, and the many faces of betrayal.

Reviews

'Eerie and moving...Quinn is a haunting fable about redemption, rendered in otherworldly, poetic prose.'

-- FT

'Quite remarkable.It has one of the rarest qualities in contemporary writing, in that it is a work of genuine depth... Strang is an exceptionally accomplished writer, and I very much hope this is just the first book by her that I read.'

-- The Scotsman

'A fascinating fever dream of a book... What a novelistic debut from Em Strang.'

-- AL Kennedy, author of We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time

'Arresting [with] a Max Porter-like intensity.'

-- Daily Mail

'Hypnotically beautiful...It has the rare quality of being precise and gripping while at the same time leaving you radically uncertain as to what has actually happened.'

-- Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

'Reads like a fever dream... Delicate and touching... This devastating story [is] one of redemption too.'

-- New Statesman

'I read it at a sitting, compelled by this strange and beautiful work... An astonishing feat of imagination.'

-- Gwen Adshead, author of The Devil You Know

'Em Strang's is a true voice, and Quinn is that rarity, an original work of fiction, which excavates trauma and memory and refuses the frameworks placed on it. This book is its own landscape. Strange and powerful.'

-- Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, winner of the Gordon Burn Prize

'Such graceful prose with not a wasted breath; such grounded sharing from the magma of experience.'

-- Alastair McIntosh, author of Soil and Soul

'A beautifully constructed and mesmerizing book that makes you think afresh about the enduring residue of pain both for those who have committed acts of violence and those affected by them. A brave and original attempt to answer our culture of dehumanization with a story that rehumanizes at every level.'

-- Marina Cantacuzino, author of The Forgiveness Project

That Em Strang is a poet comes as no surprise. She packs the text with natural imagery and quirky linguistic choices The novel iscompelling and original.

-- Literary Review

'Short but intense [Strang] clearly realises that her readers are watching out for the first sign of any dash towards the predictable. Her talent lies in the way that she keeps them inside Quinns fraying, frightened mind... Imaginative, compelling and refreshingly cliche-free.'

-- Books from Scotland

'This novel had us gripped from start to finish!'

-- Closer

Author Bio

Em Strang is a poet and writer from Scotland. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and in 2014 was selected for a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award. She is the author of several books of poetry including Bird-Woman (2016), which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prize and was awarded the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Award 2017. She works with prisoner groups at HMP Dumfries and as a freelance creative mentor. Quinn is her first novel.