LoveReading Says
Shortlisted for the 2013 RSL Ondaatje Prize.
A sharp, clever, violent novel spanning the transition of South Africa from apartheid through Truth and Reconciliation to the present as seen by three characters living in those traumatic times. Pacey, it grips attention as it juggles time and person, old and new country and left me deeply saddened by the descriptions of South Africa today and the need for so much personal security.
Click here to see Patrick Flanery's new book, Fallen Land, due out in hardback on 1 May 2013.
The Lovereading view...
This is a very confident debut novel that manages to be literary yet a page-turner at the same time. The author has said that he is influenced by the award winning writer and anyone who has read Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin will find echoes of it in his complex interwoven plot and themes of confronting your past. Interestingly, however, Flanery has said he didn’t read The Blind Assassin until a few months after finishing Absolution. Anecdotes aside this story, set in South Africa, of two novelists sharing a past and one writing the biography of the other is compelling and captivating.
Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2012.
FROM ARTICLE IN GUARDIAN 26TH NOV 2012. AUTHOR FAVOURITES OF 2012:
A S Byatt - 'Patrick Flanery's Absolution (Atlantic) is a wonderfully constructed and gripping novel about betrayal and shadows in South Africa.'
Sarah Broadhurst
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Absolution Synopsis
In this stunning literary debut, Patrick Flanery delivers a devastating and intimate portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, and the perils of taking sides when the sides are changing around you.Told in shifting perspectives, Absolution is centred on the mysterious character of Clare Wald, a controversial writer of great fame, haunted by the memories of a sister she fears she betrayed to her death and a daughter she fears she abandoned. Clare comes to learn that in this conflict the dead do not stay buried, and the missing return in other forms--such as the small child present in her daughter's last days who has reappeared, posing as Clare's official biographer. Sam Leroux, a South African expatriate returning to Cape Town after many years in New York, gradually earns Clare's trust, his own ghosts emerging from the histories that he and Clare begin to unravel, leading them both along a path in search of reconciliation and forgiveness.From the Hardcover edition.
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Patrick Flanery Press Reviews
‘One rarely encounters such a confident first novel as Absolution. Patrick Flanery arrives on the scene wholly formed: a writer of superb self—confidence, depth of insight, and resolute clarity. Clare Wald, who occupies the white-hot centre of this story, will stay with me.’ Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
About Patrick Flanery
Patrick Flanery was born in California in 1975 and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. After earning a BFA in Film from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts he worked for three years in the film industry before moving to the UK, where he completed a doctorate in Twentieth-Century English Literature at the University of Oxford. As well as publishing scholarly articles on British and South African literature and film in a number of academic journals, he has written for Slightly Foxed and The Times Literary Supplement. He lives in London.
Author photo © Andrew van der Vlie
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