Ghost MacIndoe

Following in the wake of his highly praised first two books, Jonathan Buckley’s ‘Ghost MacIndoe’ is a bold and ambitious novel that focuses on the life of Alexander MacIndoe, a self-centred man who is characterised only by his physical beauty and a complete lack of will.

Jonathan Buckley’s third novel opens with Alexander MacIndoe’s earliest memory: a February morning in 1944, in the aftermath of the second wave of German air-raids. Set mainly in London and Brighton, Ghost MacIndoe is the story of the next fifty-four years of Alexander’s life. We meet his glamorous mother and his father, a pioneering plastic surgeon; a traumatised war veteran called Mr Beckwith with whom Alexander works for several years as a gardener and, most important of all, the orphaned Megan Beckwith, whose relationship with Alexander crystallises into a romance in the 1970s. In the wake of his highly praised first two novels, Jonathan Buckley’s third miraculously brings into being one simple life and the last sixty years of English history.

Reviews

‘The mood is subdued, but the accumulated effect of his descriptions is deceptively powerful…Although “Ghost MacIndoe” celebrates the virtues of self-possession, it is as a meditation on the nature of memory itself that it makes its most lasting impression.’ Sunday Times

‘Elegiac, beautifully written and compelling. Buckley’s novel is a fine achievement.’ Christina Koning, The Times

‘The story is lifted by Buckley’s exceptionally vivid powers of description. It is the work of a writer of considerable talent.’ Melissa Denes, Sunday Telegraph

‘The quality of attention Jonathan Buckley brings to his material deserves to be called poetic…his story makes a good deal of other contemporary fiction look empty.’ Sean O'Brien, TLS

About the author

Jonathan Buckley lives in Greenwich, London. He is the author of two previous novels. The Biography of Thomas Lang was published in 1997 and Xerxes in 1999.