A Curious Earth
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:6th Mar '08
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
A wonderfully warm, compassionate and poignant look at old age, new loves and family life by the Booker Prize shortlisted author and poet.
By the author of Booker-shortlisted I'll Go To Bed At Noon.
Aldous Jones is in a bad way: his dilapidated house is empty of family but full of hoarded odds and ends that remind him of his dead wife and son.
By the author of Booker-shortlisted I'll Go To Bed At Noon.
Aldous Jones is in a bad way: his dilapidated house is empty of family but full of hoarded odds and ends that remind him of his dead wife and son. A preference for whisky over washing rapidly leads to his hospitalisation but it also reawakens his desire for sex and adventure and his lifelong passion for art.
What follows is a heartbreakingly funny quest that will lead him first to the National Gallery, where he is bewitched by a Rembrandt painting, and then to Ostend, to stay with his boemian son and a ridiculous Dutch sexologist and then through a series of somewhat misguided relationships with sympathetic women to an ending of devatating poignancy...
Every now and then, you come across a book that is so intensely satisfying you want to buy a sack-load of copies and dole them out to strangers on the street, A Curious Earth is one....if only there were more writers of his calibre at work in Britain today -- Alastair Sooke * Daily Telegraph *
Though Woodward writes of family tragedy, his canvas is so busy with artfully drawn characters, telling incidents and the beautifully delineated ebb and flow of domestic life that the experience of reading him is richly involving, poignantly comic, and even somehow uplifting... his trilogy is a wonderful achievement -- Justine Jordan * Guardian *
This immediately convincing and captivating novel is full of wit and humour and joy -- David Flusfeder * Financial Times *
A masterful portrait of old age and loneliness. I cannot praise it highly enough. If you haven't read the previous books, no matter - you will * Mail on Sunday *
Woodward wears his influences lightly, and tells this strange story about living and dying in a voice as beautiful and bright as it is learned -- Melissa Katsoulis * The Times *
ISBN: 9780099490654
Dimensions: 196mm x 130mm x 19mm
Weight: 200g
304 pages