The Rescue Man

Description

In a Liverpool torn apart by the Second World War, the 'Rescue Man' takes to saving the wounded from bombed buildings. But can he stop his own life from unravelling? Liverpool, 1939. Lonely historian Tom Baines is at work on a study of the city's architectural past but the ominous news from Europe, together with his burgeoning friendship with Richard, a young photographer, and his beautiful wife, Bella, are proving a distraction. When the bombings begin, Tom joins up as 'rescue man', retrieving the wounded and dying from the ruins of buildings, but the love affair he embarks on soon leads him into a very different kind of danger.

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. From 1998 to 2013 he was the film critic for the Independent. He is the author of six novels- The Rescue Man, which won the 2009 Authors' Club Best First Novel Award; Half of the Human Race; The Streets, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott Prize; Curtain Call, which was chosen for Waterstones and Mail on Sunday Book Clubs; Freya, a Radio 2 Book Club choice, and Eureka.

Thoughtful, beautifully observed and utterly compelling * Independent on Sunday * A fascinating novel - very moving and beautifully nuanced and observed - it beguiles with a tremendous slow-burning power -- William Boyd Brilliant...an involving meditation on passion, history and architecture * Daily Mail * A love letter to Liverpool...ambitiously conceived... He has perfect pitch when it comes to the prose of each period, so much so that when I started the novel, I had the uncanny sense that what I was reading must have been salvaged from the 1940s. Its every line convinces -- Kate Kellaway * Observer * The story has the resonant simplicity of a poem... The Rescue Man turns the ongoing frenzy of construction and destruction into a quietly powerful metaphor of how we grow up * Guardian *