Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

WHITE CITY

Kevin Power

A darkly funny, gripping and profoundly moving novel about a life spinning out of control, a life lived without the bedrock of familial love, and the corruption of material wealth that tears at the soul.

Here is rehab, where Ben the only son of a rich South Dublin banker is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether. Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam: a shady property deal in the Balkans. The deal will make Ben rich and, at one fell swoop, will deliver him from all his troubles: his addictions, his father's very public disgrace, and his own self-loathing and regret. Problems solved.

But something is amiss. For one thing, the Serbian partners don't exactly look like fools. (In fact they look like gangsters.) And, for another, Ben is being followed everywhere he goes. Someone is being taken for a ride. But who?

Kevin Power is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), which was filmed in 2012 as What Richard Did, directed by Lenny Abrahamson. Kevin is the winner of the 2009 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and many other places. Kevin lives in Dublin and teaches creative writing in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.

Available products
Book Published 2021-04-15 by Scribner

Comments

White City is brilliant on the high-octane vacuity of Ireland's rentier class. Power's trademark shimmering prose counterpoints a driving narrative... Brilliant.

I can't recommend it enough. It's often hilariously funny but it's also a sharp and smart dissection of contemporary materialism.

White City synthesises familiar forms into a whole: the rogue's confession, the young man finding his way, the post-Celtic Tiger satire on puffed-up, self-perpetuating bullshit businesses. Power shows his own capacity for comic timing and pithy aperçus.

Kevin Power's Bad Day in Blackrock (2008) was one of the most memorable Irish novels of the new century. White City has passages of striking lyrical subtlety and the different storylines are managed with great dexterity. Much has changed in Ireland since Bad Day in Blackrock was published, but as Power's adept and absorbing new novel reminds us, much has not. White City demands to be read

Shortlisted for the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year...

An immensely enjoyable and tautly written account of a young man from an affluent family whose life of privilege is turned upside down.

Capacious and comic, luxuriantly written, with an intricate plot and heightened characterisation. both riotous rant and thoughtful coming-of-age tale.