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Holly Stanton's grandfather was a spy. In Berlin in September 1939; in Norway when the Germans invaded. Sailed back to Orkney by a brave Norwegian, whose family was killed in retaliation. And he kept a diary.
Holly has always known that. It's the family story. But when her father finally passes on a transcript of the diary, she finds the 'brave Norwegian' has a name. He is real. But why was a spy writing a diary at all?
Part war-time thriller, part exploration of the ethics of story-telling, Reconciliation slips between Occupied Norway and Cambridge, London and the Highlands during the Iraq War and its aftermath.
Based on truth but laced with errors and lies, as each layer of the story peels away, we discover just how easily we have been misled. Stories always lie, but sometimes they are the only truth we have. Reconciliation is a clever, exciting and - ironically - honest account of its own bad faith.
Info autore
Guy Ware is the author of five novels, all published by Salt, including The Peckham Experiment and, most recently, Our Island Story. Guy lives with his family in south London.
Riassunto
In 1940, Holly Stanton’s grandfather was a spy, on the run in occupied Norway. He was rescued by a brave Norwegian fisherman, whose wife and children were executed in retaliation. Holly has always known this. But does that mean she should tell the story? And what if it isn’t true?
Relazione
Reconciliation opens with an intriguing apology by the author 'for the extent to which my characters fail to resemble their real-life models'. This indicates a central concern of Guy Ware's novel: namely, how the fiction writer appropriates 'facts' to create a story. It's a preoccupation that informs the book's highly original narrative structure ... a memorable and inventive meditation on reconciliation, in the sense of both settling differences and squaring the facts.
Tom Williams The Literary Review
