The Blue Book: A Novel - Couverture rigide

From one of the U.K.’s most dazzling novelists — whom Richard Ford has called “a profound writer” — comes this daring new novel set in the unsteady, self-contained world of a luxury liner. While on a transatlantic trip with her soon-to-be-fiancé Derek, Elizabeth unexpectedly runs into ex-lover Arthur, with whom she shares a shady past: the pair once worked as traveling spiritual mediums who conned the vulnerable by pretending to contact the spirits of departed loved ones. While Derek remains seasick and cabin-bound, Elizabeth wanders the ship, alternately avoiding and seeking out Arthur. Unable to avoid memories of their fractured past, she must face the deception they practiced even as she accepts the peace they brought to the grief-stricken who sought their services. Intimately addressed to “you,” the listener, The Blue Book is both a portrait of two methodical con artists and a meditation on “how love is a private language, a set of codes, to which the outside world ought not admit impediment” ( Telegraph). Irresistibly written, by turns comically wry and stunningly lyrical, with “some of the most unashamedly erotic writing since Nicholson Baker first contemplated a telephone receiver” ( New Statesman), the book slowly, deliberately, and devastatingly reveals itself to the listener. The heartbreaking stakes are ultimately nothing less than fact and fiction, life and death.

You are crossing the Atlantic on a liner with your boyfriend who may or may not be planning to propose.

You are fleeing the past - your ex-lover Arthur, the man who helped you dupe the vulnerable into believing loved ones were trying to make contact from beyond the grave.

But there's a secret you've kept from Arthur, a deception about the two of you that threatens to emerge when you discover Arthur's presence on the boat.

'An amazing conception, one that will make you want to turn back and start again the moment you have finished...the writing is as taut and thrilling as Kennedy's prose always is and there is her usual wry laughter chuckling within it all' Joan Bakewell, New Statesman

'AL Kennedy is almost unique among British novelists for her ability to write fiction that is at once challengingly experimental, luminously beautiful and utterly readable. It helps that she is fiercely observant and very funny...If you want a guide to the rough contradictions of the heart, AL Kennedy is your woman' Evening Standard