Description

Curtis Doyle, a self-made businessman and art collector, has vanished from his palatial home in the Scottish Highlands. In the wake of his disappearance, the woman who worked as his gardener is being interviewed for a possible film about her employer. A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s.

Publisher Review

‘Buckley… asks readers to think about how and why stories are told. This self-reflexivity results in a thought-provoking, artfully constructed narrative enriched by the mysteries that expand and proliferate throughout. It’s a deliciously fraught tour de force.’

– Publishers Weekly, starred review ‘[A] riveting thriller that sweeps you in from the off… Buckley’s prose is unpretentious and engrossing, weaving in a constant sense of foreboding that proves irresistible.’

– Martha Alexander, AnOther Magazine ‘A novel about the nature of storytelling, and who gets to tell and shape them.’

– Kirkus ‘Buckley’s fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key … every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.’

– Michel Faber, Guardian ‘Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.’

– Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement ‘Few writers manage to conjure such raw unease as Jonathan Buckley … completely compelling.’

– Adrian Turpin, Financial Times ‘Why isn’t Jonathan Buckley better known? His novel of love, death and melancholy comedy, The Great Concert of the Night, is captivating.’

– John Banville