Description - The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker
WINNER OF THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
'He had never seen her like that before. Awesomely beautiful, like a tree or bush that produces as much blossom or as many flowers as possible the year before it dies.'
A woman abandons her home in Holland without a word, leaving behind an impervious husband, mystified parents, and an unfinished thesis on reclusive poet Emily Dickinson. Across the sea in Britain, she arrives at an isolated cottage in the shadow of a mountain. She settles there, alone in the ancient landscape, her only contact coming from animals she encounters, a handful of wary locals, and her poetry books. But what is she fleeting? And will her new home provide redemption, or lead her further into darkness?
On a foggy afternoon, her solitude is shattered when an elusive young man jumps over her fence. Perhaps his vitality can deter the shadows, but in this uncanny place the line between kindness and betrayal is never clear. Meanwhile, the woman's husband is coming, and time is running out.
Haunting and suspenseful, The Detour explores both the weakness and the commanding power of the flesh. In the clear-eyed, uncompromising prose that we have come to expect from the award-winning Bakker, it asks- when our lives go awry, which route do we take?
'Intense ... Evocative and unsettling ... Like other recent novels it slightly resembles, such as Disgrace by J.M Coetzee and Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, The Detour has the laconic texture and angular plotting of a thriller, with shifting points of view that keep the reader guessing about what surprise is lurking around the corner.'
-Christopher Benfey, The New York Review of Books
' An affecting mystery ... pocketed with meaning and subtly menacing. It moves rapidly along.'
-The New Yorker
'One of Bakker's gifts is an ability to place us in a landscape so utterly that the damp begins to seep through the soles of our shoes, yet the terrain is never romanticised and his descriptions are at once attentive and economical. This is vital for a writer whose work deals so intimately with the physical and mental fabric of grief ... The Detour is a beautiful, oddly moving work of fiction, a quiet read that lingers long in the mind, like the ghosts that linger in our homes, and in the land around us.'
-John Burnside, The Guardian
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