Description

‘Duncan brings a new way of seeing to the world of prose’ Irish Times

Michael has been away from Ireland for most of his life and lives alone in Bilbao after the death of Catherine, his girlfriend. Each day he listens to two versions of the same piece of music before walking the same route to visit Richard Serra’s enormous installation, The Matter of Time, in the Guggenheim.

As he walks, his thoughts circle around the five-year period of mental agitation spent in Leipzig with Catherine. This ‘sabbatical’, caused by the stress of his job and the suicide of a former colleague, splits his career as an engineer into two distinct parts.

Intensely realistic, mapped out like Michael’s intricate drawings, this is a novel of precision and beguiling intelligence.

Publisher Review

He brings a mixture of the exact and the visionary . . . an original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms. * Colm Toibin * One of the most important, original and intriguing writers working now -- Niamh Campbell , author of We Were Happy A book such as W.G. Sebald might have written, had he been an Irish Engineer. A quietly compelling novel from a writer of real daring and poise -- Vona Groarke, author of Other People's Houses Haunting and devastating * Dublin Review of Books * Duncan has a sensibility and a course of investigation utterly his own -- Rob Doyle , author of Threshold Duncan brings a new way of seeing to the world of prose * Irish Times * Its plainspoken, obsessive commitment to life as an engineering project makes no attempt to bring the reader into a blunt-edged or humanist vision of engineer-as-symbol. It's far, far more intelligent than that. * Niamh Campbell *