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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
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| English | |
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KATHERINE CARLYLE
One of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction' (James Wood )
one of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction' (James Wood )
one of the strangest and most refreshingly un-English voices in contemporary fiction' (James Wood )
In the late 1980s, when scientific research is developing fast, Katherine Carlyle is created using the technique of IVF. She is stored as a frozen embryo. After eight years in the freezing cabinet, she is finally implanted in her mother and then born into a normal, loving and successful family. She nonetheless carries a trace memory of those eight years in the cold. There is a part of her that is aware of having been overlooked, ignored, and even, possibly, forgotten. By the age of nineteen, Katherine has lost her mother to cancer and feels her father to be a distant figure, always away on business. World-weary as only the young can be, she lives a life in Rome that appears, on the surface, to be glittering and full of possibility. But some weeks before she is due to go to Oxford University, she wipes her computer clean, disposes of her smartphone and disappears. No one knows where she has gone, not even her closest friends. She has chosen to inhabit a mythic, parallel version of herself. Only then can she confront the doubts and fears that she entertains about her own existence. What appears to be a misguided travelogue, a descent into a darkness and a cold that she still somehow remembers, gradually becomes the testing-ground of her father's love for her, a coming-to-terms with the circumstances and consequences of her conception, a journey to true empowerment. In Katherine Carlyle', which is a kind of Frankenstein for our times, Rupert Thomson has written a unique and profound investigation into the possible effects, both physical and psychological, of fertility treatment, and in the process he has also given us a meditation on the fragility and value of life itself. Rupert Thompson's previous novels have been hugely well-received. His fourth novel, The Insult (1996), was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was chosen by David Bowie, as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of All Time. His novel Death of a Murderer (2007) was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year, and his most recent novel Secrecy (2013) was sold to Denoël in France, Aufbau in Germany, Newton Compton in Italy, Xander in the Netherlands, Vulkan Izdavastro in Serbia, Alianza Editorial in Spain, Alten Bilek Yayinlari in Turkey and Granta in the UK and received outstanding reviews!
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Book
Published by Little Brown & Company Ltd |