Curtis Doyle, a self-made businessman and art collector, has vanished from his palatial home in the Scottish Highlands. In the wake of his disappearance, the woman who worked as his gardener is interviewed for a possible film about her employer. A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s.
‘Always well crafted, this novel is engaging in parts and digressive in others, which adds to its realism, capturing how people chatter their way down alleys, rarely hewing to the main road of a tale…. The buildup in Tell is perpetual, a sense that an explanation must be coming. But the author diverges from expectations and converges on reality, where remembering is not the same as understanding. Abruptly, someone may just disappear, and all that remains is the sight of a figure wandering across a bridge – no splash heard, just the fading ripples of “why.”’
— Tom Rachman, New York Times
‘Buckley… asks readers to think about how and why stories are told. This self-reflexivity results in a thought-provoking, artfully constructed narrative enriched by the mysteries that expand and proliferate throughout. It’s a deliciously fraught tour de force.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘[A] riveting thriller that sweeps you in from the off… Buckley’s prose is unpretentious and engrossing, weaving in a constant sense of foreboding that proves irresistible.’
— Martha Alexander, AnOther Magazine
‘A novel about the nature of storytelling, and who gets to tell and shape them.’
— Kirkus