Solace

Zusatztext "An excellent musing on families and relationships... strength lies in portraying the slow burn of kinship... hooks the reader with words unsaid; stolen glances; simmering anger—which hold the heaviness of a lifetime of buried emotion! but also of unconditional love... a warm and wise debut from a new literary talent." Informationen zum Autor Belinda McKeon, an award-winning playwright and journalist, is the author of two novels. Her work has appeared in The New York Times , The Paris Review , The Guardian , and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University. Klappentext An "artfully constructed novel, which the author, a playwright, unfurls in lush streams of consciousness” (The New Yorker), about a father and son thrown together by tragedy—from the author of Tender, McKeon's new novel coming in 2016. Set in an Ireland that catapulted into wealth at the end of the twentieth century and then suffered a swift economic decline, Belinda McKeon's Solace is an extraordinarily accomplished first novel about the conflicting values of the old and young generations and the stubborn, heartbreaking habits that mute the language of love. Tom and Mark Casey are a father and son on a collision course, two men who have always struggled to be at ease with one another. Tom is a farmer in the Irish midlands, the descendant of men who have farmed the same land for generations. Mark, his only son, is a doctoral student in Dublin, writing his dissertation on the nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth, who spent her life on her family estate, not far from the Casey farm. To his father, who needs help baling the hay and ploughing the fields, Mark's academic pursuit isn't work at all. Then, at a party in Dublin, Mark meets Joanne Lynch, a lawyer in training whom he finds irresistible. She also happens to be the daughter of a man who once spectacularly wronged Mark's father, and whose betrayal Tom has remembered every single day for twenty years. After the lightning strike of tragedy, Tom and Mark are left with grief neither can share or fully acknowledge. Not even the magnitude of their mutual loss can alter the habit of silence. "A story told with clear-eyed compassion and quiet intelligence about what it is to grow up and grow away, about the difference between 'here' and 'home.' This is a lovely debut” (Anne Enright, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering). Chapter One Mark’s father did not expect him to come and live at home. He did not expect him to gradually take over the running of the farm. In the first place, his father had no intention of handing control of the farm to anybody—it was his life, and its daily rituals and its daily difficulties were like oxygen to him, much as he might complain of them. Nor, Mark knew, did his father honestly think that farming offered any kind of future. Especially on the small scale on which he farmed, it was impossible to make a living from it. Yet none of this kept his father from thinking that Mark should do more of what he called taking an interest; that Mark should be around more often, there for the larger jobs, there to advise his father on whether to expand the yard or to buy a new piece of machinery—or, at least, there to express approval at the decisions his father had already made on these things. He did not want an heir, Mark’s father. He wanted a partner. And a life in Dublin that required Mark to be physically present in the city for only two hours a week—for the undergrad class he taught, and for the office hour he was obliged to hold afterwards—seemed to Mark’s father no barrier to the kind of partnership he had in mind. Mark was the only son. He had an older sister, Nuala, who had lived in England for years. His father had neighbours, but he would not ask them for help. He had brothers-in-law, but they lived i...

Product details

• Authors: Belinda McKeon
• Publisher: Scribner USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.02.2016
• EAN: 9781451616552
• ISBN: 978-1-4516-1655-2
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies