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From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a haunting new novel of spies and artists, passion and danger, hope in the face of despair.
Paris, 1939. The pavement rumbles with the footfall of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs-Élysées. A young, unknown writer - Samuel Beckett - recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon he will put them both in mortal danger by joining the Resistance...
Through it all we are witness to the workings of a uniquely brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into one man's timeless art.
"In this worthy successor to Longbourn, she skillfully captures Beckett's world, the rhythms of his bare-bones prose, and the edginess of his point of view." - Publishers Weekly
"Baker's virtuoso imagining of war's terrors and privations is not quite matched by her depiction of a unique, consistently elusive artistic identity." - Kirkus
"Baker's historical drama deftly explores the psyche of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century ... Harrowing." - Booklist
This information about A Country Road, A Tree was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Ed Marshall/Timeout/Camera Pre
Jo Baker was born in Lancashire and educated in Oxford and Belfast. The Undertow is her first publication in the United States. She is the author of three previous novels published in the United Kingdom: Offcomer, The Mermaid's Child, and The Telling. She lives in Lancaster.
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