A Curious Earth

Description

A wonderfully warm, compassionate and poignant look at old age, new loves and family life by the Booker Prize shortlisted author and poet. By the author of Booker-shortlisted I'll Go To Bed At Noon. Aldous Jones is in a bad way- his dilapidated house is empty of family but full of hoarded odds and ends that remind him of his dead wife and son. A preference for whisky over washing rapidly leads to his hospitalisation but it also reawakens his desire for sex and adventure and his lifelong passion for art. What follows is a heartbreakingly funny quest that will lead him first to the National Gallery, where he is bewitched by a Rembrandt painting, and then to Ostend, to stay with his boemian son and a ridiculous Dutch sexologist and then through a series of somewhat misguided relationships with sympathetic women to an ending of devatating poignancy...

Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961. After studying painting and anthropology, he published three prize-winning collections of poetry and then turned to novel writing with an ambitious trilogy of novels based on the lives of his parents. The first, August, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the second, I'll Go To Bed At Noon was on the shortlist of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and the third, A Curious Earth, was met with critical acclaim. Since then he has published another collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians (shortlisted for the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize) and begun teaching Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in Bath, where he now lives.

Every now and then, you come across a book that is so intensely satisfying you want to buy a sack-load of copies and dole them out to strangers on the street, A Curious Earth is one....if only there were more writers of his calibre at work in Britain today -- Alastair Sooke * Daily Telegraph * Though Woodward writes of family tragedy, his canvas is so busy with artfully drawn characters, telling incidents and the beautifully delineated ebb and flow of domestic life that the experience of reading him is richly involving, poignantly comic, and even somehow uplifting... his trilogy is a wonderful achievement -- Justine Jordan * Guardian * This immediately convincing and captivating novel is full of wit and humour and joy -- David Flusfeder * Financial Times * A masterful portrait of old age and loneliness. I cannot praise it highly enough. If you haven't read the previous books, no matter - you will * Mail on Sunday * Woodward wears his influences lightly, and tells this strange story about living and dying in a voice as beautiful and bright as it is learned -- Melissa Katsoulis * The Times *