books
 Quilt Nicholas Royle Début fiction Publication: 26 August 2010 / £7.99 In his much anticipated and exceptional first novel, literary scholar Nicholas Royle charts the muddled hinterland of bereavement in a stylistic tour de force at once hauntingly beautiful and experimental. Facing the disarray and disorientation around his father’s death, a man contends with the strange power of the house his parents once lived in. He sets about the mundane, 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, which begins with the construction - in his father’s dining room - of an aquatic tank to house four stingrays. As he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project, relaying its new developments to his partner in telephone conversations that begin to disturb her, his grip on reality seems to slip. Nicholas Royle challenges and experiments with literary form to forge a new mode of storytelling that is both playful and inquisitive. Tender, absorbing and at times shockingly funny, this extraordinary novel is both mystery and love story. It confronts the mad hand of grief and embraces the endless possibilities of language. The book ends with an Afterword – a challenging and timely essay by the author on the state of the novel, titled ‘Reality Literature’. |
