Description

‘When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology …’

It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a ‘special appointment’.

Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again

Publisher Review

Uncanny, strange and exquisite, akin to the Mitteleuropean fictions of Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Milan Kundera -- Financial Times A masterful meditation on exile ... by one of our most original writers -- Irish Independent 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 This Happy Many have seen the tendency among Irish writers, from Joyce and Beckett up to Eimear McBride, towards experimentation as originating in this sense of foundational linguistic dispossession. With this novel, Duncan proves himself to be one of the most subtle explorers of this condition writing today -- Kevin Brazil * Literary Review * His best novel yet: a darkly ruminative tale of exile and endeavour, under whose surface move the tectonic plates of the twentieth century -- Rob Doyle, author of * Threshold * Not a huge number of literary novels tackle the world of work. Out of this rather unusual material Adrian Duncan has crafted a quiet, beautifully written, intellectually provocative and compelling story, an assured blend of mastery and mystery. -- Enda O'Doherty * Dublin Review of Books * A stunning novel of landscape ... No other novel I have read in some time has left such an unsettling impression... -- James Doyle * Bookmunch *