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James Kelman - Dirt Road (2nd Hand Paperback)
SKU B002614
Availability:
1 available
Original price
£2.70
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Original price
£2.70
Original price
£2.70
£2.70
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£2.70
Current price
£2.70
.Synopsis
Murdo, a teenager obsessed with music, dreams of a life beyond home. His recently widowed dad, Tom, stumbles towards the future, terrified of losing what remains of his family. Both are in search of something as they set out from rural Scotland on a journey to the American South.
While at their kind relatives’ house, the grieving father and son share no words of comfort with each other, Murdo losing himself in music while his reticent and protective dad escapes through books. The aunt, “the very very best,” Murdo calls her, provides whatever solace he receives, until his father comes around in a scene of great emotional release.
As James Wood has written in The New Yorker, “The pleasure, as always in Kelman, is being allowed to inhabit mental meandering and half-finished thoughts, digressions and wayward jokes, so that we are present” with his characters.
Dirt Road is a powerful story about the strength of family ties, the consolation of music, and one unforgettable journey from darkness to light.
Details
- Format : Standard 2nd Hand Paperback
- Condition : Good (Almost Very Good)
- Category : Fiction - Scottish Fiction
- Published : 2016 (Canongate)
- ISBN : 9781782118251
- SKU : B002614
- PPC : SP300gm
- RRP : £8.99
- Quantity Available : 1 only.
External Reviews
"It’s this quality of deeply imagined human life, with all its variance and inconsistencies, that so many of Kelman’s imitators lack. There is never anything glib about the outcome of his fiction. His stories are without the accessorising of class markers that you see in so many books of this type – where lack of money means drink, say, or domestic violence. Those easy trades of reality for caricature have damaged a great number of other novels that may have had Kelman’s ambition, but not his literary fineness. In Dirt Road we see him continuing to show how human experience can be energised and renewed by its modest scale, not flattened by it into a stereotype. It is another masterpiece from one of our best writers." - The Guardian.
'Dirt Road is brilliant . . . a deeply moving and exciting novel.' - Roddy Doyle.
'A brilliantly understated tale about coming of age, grief and the folk music of the American deep south . . . poignant and beautiful.' - Daily Telegraph.
'A delight . . . The best thing Kelman has written.' - Allan Massie, The Scotsman.
'In Dirt Road James Kelman brings alive a human consciousness like no other writer can.' - Alan Warner.
The Author
James Kelman is a Scottish novelist, short story writer, playwright and essayist. His novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 1989. Kelman won the 1994 Booker Prize with How Late It Was, How Late.
Featured Author . . . James Kelman