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Ever since Keith Ridgway published his landmark cult novel Hawthorn & Child, his ardent fans have yearned for more. Finally, Ridgway gives us A Shock, his thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good new novel.
Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it's at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They're on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending.
Perhaps Ridgway's most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell―he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don't know what time it is...
"Sex, lies, and drugs shape the interlocking and recursive narratives in Irish writer Ridgway's marvelous latest, revolving around a set of neighboring London houses...What lingers is the overwhelming sensory experience of Ridgway's prose...This one sets the reader's mind ablaze." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Where this novel excels in particular is in Ridgway's ability to evoke the mental states of his characters...Once this novel clicks into place, its blend of the heady and the visceral is immersive and compelling." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about A Shock 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.
Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner and the author of the award-winning novels The Long Falling, The Parts, and Animals, as well as the collection of stories Standard Time and novella Horses.
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