Mountains of the Moon
A Novel
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
After a ten-year stint in a London prison, Louise Alder has a new name, a cold room, and a past full of secrets.
After Louise Adler (Lulu) is released, with only a new alias to rebuild her life, she works a series of dead-end jobs and carries a past full of secrets: a childhood marked by the violence and madness of her parents, followed by a reckless adolescence. From abandoned psychiatric hospitals to Edwardian-themed casinos, from a brief first love to the company of criminals, Lulu has spent her youth in an ever-shifting landscape of deceit and survival.
But when she’s awarded an unexpected settlement claim after prison, she travels to the landscape of her childhood imagination, the central African range known as the Mountains of the Moon.There, in the region’s stark beauty, she attempts to piece together the fragments of her battered psyche.
Told in multilayered, hallucinatory flashbacks, Mountains of the Moon traces a traumatic youth and explores the journey of a young woman trying to transform a broken life into something beautiful. This dazzling novel from a distinctive new voice is sure to garner the attention of critics and readers alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's no denying that a lot goes down in I.J. Kay's debut, much of it out of chronological order and narrated in a motley pidgin of London Cockney, regressive baby talk, and pop-song lyrics by an untrustworthy ex-con variously known as Kim, Beverly, Jackie, Dawn, and Catherine. That these ingredients make for a compulsively readable novel instead of a complete mess is almost entirely courtesy of the idiosyncratic heroine, whose real name is Louise Adler. Louise grows up in a nightmarishly abusive household, spends her teenage years in and out of institutions, and winds up working at a casino while fraternizing with a cast of shady characters like "the velvit gentleman," doomed rich boy Quentin, and the desire-object Louise calls "the Oak Tree." We know early on where it will all lead: to the spectacular, botched crime Louise confesses to and her subsequent journey to Africa in search of the moon -mountains of her childhood imagination and where her life will depend on the skills she has picked up as a longtime survivor. But it's the inimitable voice that Kay has worked out that makes Louise's journey unforgettable, checkered with personal touches and a timbre of defiantly playful happiness that belies the deep sadness of her circumstances and the hard-boiled content of her flight from disaster to freedom. The novel's impressive air of feminist noir and hard-knock psychological realism are merely molehills that the unusual (and personal) prose promotes to the scale of mountains.
