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...
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...
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...
Jonathan Buckley’s third novel opens with Alexander MacIndoe’s earliest memory: a February morning in 1944, in the aftermath of the second wave of German air-raids. Set mainly in London and Brighton, Ghost MacIndoe is the story of the next fifty-four years of Alexander’s life. We meet his glamorous mother and his father, a banker; a traumatised war veteran called Mr Beckwith...