Black Dove

Informationen zum Autor Colin McAdam has a PhD in English from Cambridge University. His first novel, Some Great Thing , was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His second novel, Fall , was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize. A Beautiful Truth , his third novel, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Klappentext "In a tall and narrow house, on a stained and busy street, live twelve-year-old Oliver and his father, a story-loving writer. Haunted by the ghost of his alcoholic mother, Oliver finds comfort in his father's impromptu tales: the Black Dove, an elusive flower that gives strength; the girl who consumes it as she battles attackers and yearns for happier realms. Stories where lonely souls keep searching despite their losses and grief. Running from a bully one night, Oliver finds refuge in a junk shop owned by an enigmatic man. Soon, instead of hiding in the janitor's closet after school, Oliver spends afternoons in the shop, a cavernous place full of storied oddities and grubby wonders where creatures rise up from the basement. A snake in the shape of a boy. A hunter named Night, part panther, part hound, who proves to Oliver that the world holds invisible wonder. Wanting to forget his mother, afraid of his own genes, constantly harassed by bullies, Oliver decides to follow the shop-owner down the path of genetic editing. As he begins his transformation he meets the girl from across the street, and their friendship grows in a neighbourhood where magic is real, where murderers gather, and where the darker consequences of fantasies play out. A twisting story of grief and revenge, Black Dove is a thrilling read with its own kind of magic. In rich but tightly reined prose, McAdam celebrates the value and shortfalls of storytelling, finding a light in all the darkness to conjure a tender portrait of childhood's end"-- Leseprobe 1   Last December there was one leaf left in the neighbourhood. It was hanging high from the tip of a branch, curled up and wrinkled like a little man who knew he was going to fall.      Oliver stared at the leaf from his bedroom window in the morning and looked beyond it to the skyline of the city. He lived in a tall and narrow old house on a stained and busy street, in an area that was not the nicest part of town but probably not the worst. Stockyards full of cattle used to be around the corner, and nearby railroads still carried freight trains that groaned half-awake through the night. He had lived in that house since he was born.      His room was at the front, at the top, his dad’s was below. There was a third room that his dad used as a study, where he sat every day writing books.      He was always writing something. Some days Oliver sat down with him quietly in his study and waited to hear a story. He would look at his dad’s phone or imagine he was riding his bike while he sat there. He wasn’t always good at sitting still.      Even when his dad wasn’t writing he was making up stories. He told them to Oliver at bedtime or when they went for long drives. He told them at breakfast.      “I have a completely unbelievable story for you,” he would say. “Totally unsuitable for a child.”      He made things up while Oliver ate toast, and even though the stories were never quite as advertised, Oliver appreciated the noise and the distraction—anything that kept his mind away from the day ahead at school.      When he left the house he looked up at the leaf and kept the sight of it in his mind. Twenty minutes to the school’s main gate, through the doors, down those corridors of slogans and judgment, Oliver was as uncomfortable and unwelcome as that leaf in winte...

Product details

• Authors: Colin McAdam
• Publisher: Soho Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 07.02.2023
• EAN: 9781641294225
• ISBN: 978-1-64129-422-5
• No. of pages: 336
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature