A Sunday Times Book of the Year
“Like cabinets of curiosities, Buckley’s novels are always alluringly crammed with weird and wonderful material. Scintillatingly written, this fictional journal penned by a man in commemoration of his lost lover offers a feast of beguiling information, suavely sardonic comedy and ravishingly visualised scenes of natural and artistic beauty.”
Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
Jonathan Buckley is a novelist of unusual excellence, unusual not only because of his exceptional literary skills but in his preference for uncommon subjects and uncommon ways of approaching them. Nostalgia, his 2013 novel about a small Tuscan town, viewed it from a multitude of angles: history, geography, changing residents, flora, fauna, festivals. The river is the river (2015) called the nature and techniques of storytelling into question. Telescope (2011), a tour de force of imaginative vitality and buoyant wit, gradually revealed its narrator to be prematurely dying of a cruelly disfiguring disease.… Read more