The Hummingbird and The Bear

(Paperback)

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Description

Sam Taylor knows he should be content with his life; with a high-flying career in the city and a beautiful fiancee, his lot is better than most. But he can't help but feel something is missing.

When Sam meets enigmatic American Kay at a Cotswolds wedding as he holds out his umbrella for her in the pouring rain, he believes he has found someone who completes him. Throwing caution to the wind, Sam decides to risk everything and pursue Kay across the Atlantic to her native New York and the home she shares with her husband, Chris. Nicholas Hogg's novel is a taut and highly charged story of passion and adultery.

Set against the backdrop of the financial crisis, The Hummingbird and the Bear follows a powerful and illicit love from England to New York, from the known to the unknown. Both shocking and delightful, it confirms Hogg's position among the finest of today's young writers.

Praise for his previois novel Show Me the Sky:

"An assured and gripping debut." BBC Radio 3.

"Hogg performs a full range of literary circus feats... leading his reader on an exotic journey." Adelaide Advertiser.

Like a four-part harmony, Hogg balances these voices, strengthening the book's message of staying true to one's roots. Sunday Herald

"His subtle and clever novel weaves together five different narrative strands... plotted so artfully." The Big Issue.

Reviews

Nicholas Hogg's The Hummingbird and the Bear is a timely and moving examination of passionate love, set against the backdrop of the financial crisis. Personal lives implode alongside balance sheets as the action moves from the safe green hills of the Home Counties to the badlands of the U.S.-Mexico border. Hogg's work eschews the usual macho cliches and finds something new to say about the engine of ambition in the banker's psyche.

Nicholas Hogg comes across the pond to show us another side of our selves. With an eye for the American absurd, Hogg tells us how we love now - impulsively, rootlessly, never far from violence. - Rachel Klein, author of The Moth Diaries

A transatlantic blend of British prose and American pace... a dangerous love affair with characters who live and breathe, and an ending that left me reeling. Read it with care.

From the opening page I was drawn into this fast and furious story. - newbooks

Author Bio

Nominated for the 2010 IMPAC International Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel, Show Me the Sky, and winner of the New Writing Ventures prize for fiction, Nicholas Hogg has also had work broadcast by the BBC. His award-winning short stories feature alongside leading writers Hilary Mantel, Lionel Shriver, Louis de Bernieres and Sir Paul McCartney on the innovative mobile publishing venture, Ether Books.