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**Finalist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize** **Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize for Innovative Fiction, and the Roehampton Poetry Prize** From the award-winning British author—a poet's noir narrative that tells the story of a D-Day veteran in postwar America: a good man, brutalized by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it, yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself. Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can't return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he finds his way from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but—as those dark, classic movies made clear—the country needed outsiders to study and to dramatize its new anxieties. Both an outsider and, gradually, an insider, Walker finds work as a journalist, and tries to piece his life together as America is beginning to come apart: riven by social and racial divisions, spiraling corruption, and the collapse of the inner cities. Robin Robertson's fluid verse pans with filmic immediacy across the postwar urban scene—and into the heart of an unforgettable character—in this highly original work of art.
**Finalist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize** **Winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize for Innovative Fiction, and the Roehampton Poetry Prize** From the award-winning British author—a poet's noir narrative that tells the story of a D-Day veteran in postwar America: a good man, brutalized by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it, yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself. Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can't return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he finds his way from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco, we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but—as those dark, classic movies made clear—the country needed outsiders to study and to dramatize its new anxieties. Both an outsider and, gradually, an insider, Walker finds work as a journalist, and tries to piece his life together as America is beginning to come apart: riven by social and racial divisions, spiraling corruption, and the collapse of the inner cities. Robin Robertson's fluid verse pans with filmic immediacy across the postwar urban scene—and into the heart of an unforgettable character—in this highly original work of art.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the coverfrom Part II: 1948
The heat was gone. They could feel it. There was a hectic joy downtown, a release. King Eddy’s six-deep at the bar and still coming.
‘Okay, guys. Best killing in the movies.’ ‘Tommy Udo! It’s gotta be Tommy Udo!’ ‘That’s up there, sure, but how about Raw Deal when the broad gets the flambé in the face?’ ‘Didn’t kill her, though.’ ‘What about T-Men, when The Schemer gets cooked in the steam-room?’ ‘Nice . . .’ ‘That other film of his, the Western, what’s it called? Border Incident! That’s got a death by tractor.’ ‘Or Union Station, half a mile away – death by cattle stampede!’ ‘I like that shoot-out in the hall of mirrors . . . ’ ‘Nah, too classy. I’d vote for Decoy – Jean Gillie crushing her boyfriend with her car.’ ‘Yeah, or that chesty dame with the ice-pick, Janis Carter.’ ‘He survived . . .’ ‘I’d take Raymond Burr in Desperate. Great movie. The way he goes over the stair-rail at the end and drops four flights. That’s a lulu.’ ‘Well, if you’re talking stairs it’s gotta be Tommy Udo, c’mon . . .’ ‘Yeah: hard to beat that – tying an old lady to her wheelchair then pushing her down a flight of stairs. Widmark’s first film, and he was dynamite.’ ‘Okay. All agreed? Right. Kiss of Death. Udo gets the cake.’
* He remembered the German on the barricade who took a magnesium flare in the chest and went up like a bonfire: so white you couldn’t look, but you couldn’t quite look away.
*
He dreamt the mountains were on fire and the flames were gliding down the sides like lava, the mountains were slipping into the sea which was on fire, into the city, which was also burning, and the ground opened up then and he dreamt that he walked away, streets full of stones, and he saw a black man black with flame, black leaves falling all around him: a black autumn, coming down. And Pike, he dreamt of Pike, pinning him by the throat to the ground, with a knife. And then he woke.
*
There was a new crack through the tiles in the bathroom, running in a straight line from the window to the door.
*
He was working nights at the Press, nights out on the street, sharpening now after the turn in the year, the air loosened after the rain, the pavement black and glinting. There were parts of the city that were pure blocks of darkness, where light would slip in like a blade to nick it, carve it open: a thin stiletto, then a spill of white; the diagonal gash of a shadow, shearing; the jagged angle sliding over itself to close; the flick-knife of a watchman’s torch, the long gasp of headlights from nowhere, their yawning light – then just as quickly their falling away: closed over, swallowed by the oiled, engraining, leaden dark. He hears someone running but there’s no one there. His shadow folds into the wall, then along it. Then gone.
*
‘Hey, Walker. Wanted in Overholt’s office.’
He went through, past the juniors: Pike,...
About the Author-
ROBIN ROBERTSON was brought up on the northeast coast of Scotland and now lives in London. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has published five collections of poetry and has received a number of honors, including the Petrarca-Preis, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and all three Forward Prizes. His selected poems, Sailing the Forest, was published in 2014.
October 22, 2018 Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this insistent novel in verse from Robertson (Sailing the Forest) captures a D-Day veteran’s tortured reckoning with the postwar hollowing out of downtown Los Angeles. Back from Europe, Walker is mesmerized by L.A., “the city/ a magnesium strip; a carnival/ on one long midway.” That romantic view is tempered by the city’s underbelly of violence, racism, and poverty, which he encounters as a cub reporter. Dismayed by Skid Row, he pitches a feature on homelessness that sends him up to San Francisco and its “play of height and depth, this/ changing sift of color and weather.” Walker returns to find downtown L.A. being “demolished and rebuilt” into highway interchanges and parking lots. “The drumfire of falling/ buildings” calls back Walker’s war memories, and Robertson skillfully intermingles imagery of battles in France and L.A.’s demolished blocks to powerfully contend that “cities are a kind of war.” Less convincing is when Robertson exchanges his magnificent depictions for pedantry, including the declaration that “they call this progress, when it’s really only greed.” Still, this novel succeeds in bringing life to a crucial moment of urban history; Robertson’s vision of Los Angeles under siege is simply indispensable.
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