Room Temperature
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Granta Books
Published:7th Jul '11
Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date
A warm-hearted, tender novel about marriage, fatherhood and playing the tuba, part of a stunning redesign of Baker's Granta backlist.
On an autumn day, at around three-fifteen in the afternoon, Mike sits down in the rocking chair to feed his infant daughter, Bug. The novel that unfolds over the next twenty minutes of Mike's life is a warmly comic masterpiece of observation, reflection and digression. Baker brilliantly recreates Mike's roving mind, with its tangential thoughts about peanut butter and its big questions about fatherhood, marriage, and love. The result is surprisingly thrilling to read: funny, linguistically exuberant, tender and alive to the small mysteries and pleasures of everyday life.
Nicholson Barker flips crazily between high culture and low farce, swinging from Frances Yate's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition to the stealth required in picking one's nose. If he can cram this sort of wealth into half an hour's baby minding one quivers to think how he would sport with a thousand years of solitude -- Anthony Quinn * Listener *
What emerges from Room Temperature is something much grimmer than appears at first sight, and more melancholy - a landscape where the ghost of Nabokov lives, and which Baker looks as if he is soon to enter -- Andrew Motion * Observer *
Sparkling ... frequently hilarious...This is a big novel unfolding ... so subtly that one is scarcely aware of its magnitude until the last page * Boston Globe *
His prose is captivating and full of longing. * Harper's *
ISBN: 9781847083494
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 10mm
Weight: 101g
128 pages