Ghost MacIndoe

Description

Following in the wake of his highly praised first two books, Jonathan Buckley's 'Ghost MacIndoe' is a bold and ambitious novel that focuses on the life of Alexander MacIndoe, a self-centred man who is characterised only by his physical beauty and a complete lack of will. Jonathan Buckley's third novel opens with Alexander MacIndoe's earliest memory: a February morning in 1944, in the aftermath of the second wave of German air-raids. Set mainly in London and Brighton, Ghost MacIndoe is the story of the next fifty-four years of Alexander's life. We meet his glamorous mother and his father, a pioneering plastic surgeon; a traumatised war veteran called Mr Beckwith with whom Alexander works for several years as a gardener and, most important of all, the orphaned Megan Beckwith, whose relationship with Alexander crystallises into a romance in the 1970s. In the wake of his highly praised first two novels, Jonathan Buckley's third miraculously brings into being one simple life and the last sixty years of English history.

Jonathan Buckley was born in Birmingham, and has contributed to and edited a number of Rough Guides. His first novel, The Biography of Thomas Lang, was published by Fourth Estate in 1997, followed by Xerxes (1999), Ghost MacIndoe (2001), Invisible (2004) and the critically acclaimed So He Takes the Dog (2006). He lives in Brighton with his wife and son.

'The mood is subdued, but the accumulated effect of his descriptions is deceptively powerful ... Although Ghost MacIndoe celebrates the virtues of self-possession, it is as a meditation on the nature of memory itself that it makes its most lasting impression'. Sunday Times