Authorjonathan@buckley

The River is the River

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“The river is the river opens with a disclaimer. We are told that names have been changed. But “words recorded here were actually spoken”, and therein lies the power of Jonathan Buckley’s finely tuned ninth novel: it is told at a remove. Carefully cradled in the imagination of an unidentified narrator, and swaddled in several layers of story, the narrative is filtered through a rich chorus of...

Nostalgia

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The small Tuscan town of Castelluccio is preparing for its annual festival, a spectacular pageant in which a leading role will be taken by the self-exiled English painter Gideon Westfall. A man proudly out of step with modernity, Westfall is regarded by some as a maestro, but in Castelluccio – as in the wider art world – he has his enemies, and his niece – just arrived from...

The Biography of Thomas Lang

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Thomas Lang was an outstanding concert pianist. He was elusive, arrogant, depressive, mysterious, and a genius. He died mysteriously, probably by his own hand. Bit by bit, in a volley of letters between his would-be biographer and Lang’s brother Christopher, his life is pieced together and the real Thomas Lang begins to emerge.Jonathan Buckley’s first novel ponders the nature of biography, the...

Xerxes

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Set in Germany in the 1820s, Ettlinger, a young scholar who has been commissioned to design and build a chapel, finds himself increasingly swept up in a circle of friends who regularly meet to joust and outwit each other with stories. At the same time he receives from Wolgast, a local collector of antiques, an invitation to use his library to assist him in his research. But over the coming weeks...