The Blue Book

Description

An extraordinary story of love, loss and the act of deception from one of the finest novelists in contemporary British fiction. You are crossing the Atlantic on a liner with your boyfriend who may or may not be planning to propose. You are fleeing the past - your ex-lover Arthur, the man who helped you dupe the vulnerable into believing loved ones were trying to make contact from beyond the grave. But there's a secret you've kept from Arthur, a deception about the two of you that threatens to emerge when you discover Arthur's presence on the boat.

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards - including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

AL Kennedy is almost unique among British novelists for her ability to write fiction that is at once challengingly experimental, luminously beautiful and utterly readable. It helps that she is fiercely observant and very funny... If you want a guide to the rough contradictions of the heart, AL Kennedy is your woman -- Jane Shilling * Evening Standard * An amazing conception, one that will make you want to turn back and start again the moment you have finished... the writing is as taught and thrilling as Kennedy's prose always is and there is her usual wry laughter chuckling within it all -- Joan Bakewell * New Statesman * This is a masterful novel, imaginatively crafted, shaped by big, precisely articulated emotion * The Times * Kennedy is a fine stylist and single passages are exquisite * Financial Times * Offers the pleasures of a work in which form and content dovetail with extraordinary skill, and in which narrative tricks are utilised to enlarge on the theme of deception rather than for the sake of tricksiness itself -- Edmund Gordon * Sunday Times *