Centuries of June - A Novel

Zusatztext "Part ghost story! part psychological mystery and part vaudeville show. Think Scheherazade by way of “Tristram Shandy” by way of “The Sixth Sense.”— Washington Post "A tour de force in its mastery of styles! the book also has moments of high silliness—though toward the end Donohue weaves the threads of plot together in a surprising and affecting way."— Kirkus Reviews "Donohue's faultless eye for character and keen sense of humor keeps what could easily become a muddled mess pristine! with members of his quorum shining individually but also acting as cogs in the larger story's machinery. There are moments when the reader is left to wonder how things can possibly come together! but it's worthwhile to trust Donohue's narrators as they lead this puzzling and greatly satisfying trip."— Publishers Weekly “Donohue’s polished prose holds the story together and offers a more than satisfying ending.”— Booklist “VERDICT: Donohue’s tour de force blends aspects of time travel and reincarnation genres into a witty whole. With a touch of David Mitchell and Audrey Niffenegger! but a witty style uniquely the author’s own! this novel about a clueless man! who may in some future life get it right! is a pleasure to read.”— Library Journal “[T]he product here is uniquely Donohue! and the craft seamless in the spinning of an absorbing skein of yarns in a marvelous display of voice weaving together to form a single tapestry: a “parti-colored utterance” (to quote Annie Dillard) unfolding about love! mortality! men and women! memory! family! and the fundamental force of storytelling.” — Buffalo News Informationen zum Autor Keith Donohue is the author of the acclaimed novels The Stolen Child and Angels of Destruction . For several years he was a speechwriter at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., and he now works at another federal agency. He lives with his family in Wheaton, Maryland. Klappentext Set in the bathroom of an old house just before dawn on a night in June! Centuries of June is a black comedy about a man attempting to tell the story of how he ended up on the floor with a hole in his head. But he keeps getting interrupted by a series of suspects-eight women lying in the bedroom just down the hall. Each woman tells a story drawn from five centuries of American myth and legend in a wild medley of styles and voices.Keith Donohue has been praised for his vivid imagination and for evoking "the otherworldly with humor and the ordinary with wonder" (Audrey Niffenegger). Centuries of June is a romp through history! a madcap murder mystery! an existential ghost story! and a stunning tour de force at once ingenious! sexy! inspiring! and ultimately deeply moving. We all fall down. Perhaps it is a case of bad karma or simply a matter of being more prone to life’s little accidents, but I hit my head and fell hard this time around. Facedown on the bathroom floor, I watched my blood escape from me, spreading across the cool ceramic tiles like an oil slick, too bright and theatrical to be real. A scarlet river seeped into the grout, which will be murder to clean. The flow hit the edge of the bathtub and pooled like water behind a dam. I blinked, and in that instant, the blood became a secondary concern to the hole in the back of my head, not so much the fact of the wound, but the persistent sharpness of pain around the edges. Yet even the knot of it weighs lightly against the mysterious cause of my immediate predicament. I have an overpowering urge to reach back and stick my fingers over the wound to investigate the aperture and determine the radius of my consternation, but despite the willful signals of my brain, my arms will not obey, and I cannot alter a single aspect of my situation. Which is: I have landed in an awkward position. My left arm pinned beneath me, my right ...

Product details

• Authors: Keith Donohue
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 20.11.2012
• EAN: 9780307450296
• ISBN: 978-0-307-45029-6
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 203 mm x 19 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Fiction > Narrative literature > Contemporary literature (from 1945)