Katherine Carlyle
A Novel
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
An identity crisis leads a young woman—conceived through IVF—on a mysterious journey to the end of the world in this breathtakingly original novel about where we come from and how our origins shape us.
“A haunting family tale . . . a contemporary masterpiece.” —Guardian
Unmoored by her mother’s death and feeling her father to be an increasingly distant figure, Katherine Carlyle abandons the set course of her life and starts out on a mysterious journey to the ends of the world. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scène for a courageous leap to true empowerment.
Katherine Carlyle is Rupert Thomson’s breakthrough novel. Written in the beautifully spare, lucid, and cinematic prose Thomson is known for, and powered by his natural gift for storytelling, it uses the modern techniques of IVF to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about identity, the search for personal meaning, and how we are loved.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Thomson's (Secrecy) wonderfully written novel, London native Katherine "Kit" Carlyle is a headstrong, fanciful, and flighty 19-year-old living in Rome. Her father, David, is a roving CNN journalist who was largely an absent parent, and her mother, Stephanie, died of cancer six years previously. Having landed a scholarship to study at Oxford University, Kit obsesses over the fact that she is an IVF baby: she was stored for eight years as an embryo before she was implanted in Stephanie. Kit feels as if David blames her for causing Stephanie's cancer by the IVF procedure, so Kit decides to run away and come to terms with her own identity. Kit travels to Berlin to stay with the orthodontist Klaus Frings, demonstrating her uncanny knack for meeting a series of helpful, generous strangers. All the while, she enjoys fantasizing about the scenes of her frantic, desperate father searching for her, and she even arranges rendezvous with him, which she doesn't attend. She calls herself Misty and leaves Berlin to stay in Moscow, adding another layer of deception to her vanishing act. Thomson's seamless prose style and striking minor characters round out this satisfying, offbeat narrative.
