In Another Country
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Includes the story ‘In Another Country’, adapted into the multi-award winning feature film ’45 Years’.
The stories of David Constantine are unlike any others. His characters possess you instantly, making you see the world as they do – sometimes as exiles, driven into isolation by convictions that even they don’t fully understand; sometimes as carriers of an unspoken but unbearable weight. The things they pursue, or evade, are often unseen and at a distance – like the perfectly preserved body of a woman in the title story, waiting to be discovered in the receding ice of a Swiss glacier. These tokens of the past, or future, haunt Constantine’s characters, but the landscapes that produce them also offer salvation, places of refuge or small treasures to take solace in – like the piece of driftwood a beachcomber chooses to carve into his idea of perfection.
Gathering together stories from over two decades of writing, this selection demonstrates why Constantine has been hailed as ‘perhaps the finest of contemporary writers in this form’. Their bewitching and urgent language is at one and the same time unsettling and ‘strong enough to help’.
Featuring the story, 'In Another Country', that inspired the motion picture, 45 Years. Also featuring selected stories from David Constantine's Comma Press back catalogue : Under The Dam (2005); The Shieling (2009); Tea at the Midland (2012).
45 Years has its UK release on Friday 28h August (Film4 / BFI) starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. Directed by Andrew Haigh (Weekend , HBO’s Looking).
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Praise for David Constantine
-‘Flawless and unsettling’ - Boyd Tonkin, Books of the Year 2005, The Independent.
-‘Every sentence is both unpredictable and exactly what it should be.’– AS Byatt, Book of the Week, The Guardian
-‘The excellence of the collection is fractal: the whole book is excellent, and every story is excellent, and every paragraph is excellent, and every sentence is excellent. And, unlike some literary fiction, it's effortless to read.' - The Independent on Sunday.
-'Masterful... pregnant with fluctuating interpretations and concealed motives.' - The Guardian.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Despite such accolades as winning the 2013 Frank O'Connor Award for Tea at the Midland and Other Stories, British short fiction author, poet, and translator Constantine has never been published in the U.S. This book corrects that oversight by bringing a brilliant selection of Constantine's previously published stories to North American readers. The 17 short stories in this collection include "Tea at the Midland," in which a troubled couple contemplates the death-defying antics of nearby surfers, and the title story, about an aging married man who receives a letter that catapults him back to Germany from the U.K. and the harrowing death of his first love. A film adaptation is slated for release in 2015 under the name 45 Years. The characters sometimes take themselves too seriously, but they all provoke genuine pathos, and Constantine manages to avoid sentimentality. The diverse characters include ex-monks, shamed canons, prostitutes, squatters, successful businessmen, and university professors, but a common thread of silent suffering and dignity ties them all together. The tragic and the beautiful in each of their experiences is heightened by the author's impeccable eloquence and poetic imagery.
