A Lonely Man
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A New Statesman Book of the Year 2021
A Metro Book of the Year 2021
A Washington Post '10 Best Thriller and Mystery Books of 2021'
'Gripping.' FINANCIAL TIMES
'A classy page-turner.' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'A taut, subtle, postmodern literary thriller.' SUNDAY TIMES
When two men meet in a bookshop in Berlin they begin an uneasy friendship. Patrick has a sensational story to tell: a ghostwriter for a Russian oligarch recently found hanged, he says the people who killed his boss are now following him...
A twist on the cat-and-mouse narrative, A Lonely Man is about the search for identity and the elastic nature of truth. As the two men's association hurtles towards tragedy, Robert is forced to confront whether actual events are the only things that give a story life, and if some stories are too dangerous to tell.
'A remarkable debut; an accomplished and intricately plotted story.'-JON McGREGOR
'A Lonely Man is a delicate snare of a novel.'-BRANDON TAYLOR
'A thrilling, unnerving novel. a page-turner with exacting syntax and emotional heft.'-CATHERINE LACEY
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this beguiling literary thriller about the ethics of storytelling, Power (Mothers) examines the plundering tendencies of oligarchs and writers alike. Robert Prowe, an English novelist living in Berlin, strikes up a friendship with fellow writer Patrick Unsworth, who shares an outlandish tale: having been hired to ghostwrite the autobiography of dissident Russian oligarch Sergei Vanyashin and entrusted with compromising information about Putin's regime, he is now being tracked by Russian agents. Moreover, Vanyashin and various figures in his circle have died under suspicious circumstances. Robert can't decide if his new acquaintance is lying or "playing out some fantasy," but decides to use Patrick's story, without his permission, as the basis for a new novel. Robert's "twenty-four fucking carat" material comes with a cost, as ominous signs emerge that he and his family could be in danger. For a novel filled with so much trickery, there are some slack sections, for example, when Robert prepares his family's summer house in Sweden or returns to London for a funeral. Furthermore, the bond between the two men isn't quite magnetic enough for the reader to feel the sting of the eventual vampiric betrayal. By and large, though, Power maintains an elegant sense of intrigue around the lengths writers will go for a good story.
