Courting Shadows - Hardcover

Poster, Jem

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340822570 ISBN 13: 9780340822579

Publisher: London: Sceptre, 2002

Synopsis

In the winter of 1881 John Stannard, a young architect, is in self-imposed exile in a remote English village carrying out repairs to the parish church. Arrogant and insensitive to the needs of others, he soon begins to inflict serious damage on the thirteenth century building itself and on those with whom he comes into contact, but this is nothing to the problems that arise when he catches the eye of beautiful ambitious young local girl Ann Rosewell. As the villagers turn nasty and lust leads him astray, Stannard struggles to keep a grip on his sanity and what begins as an innocent affair soon descends into a nightmarish journey that ends in murder. Courting Shadows is a gripping exploration of truth vs fiction, head vs heart and progress vs preservation. Most of all it is about the creation of fictions and our capacity to deceive not only each other but most of all ourselves.

About this title

About the Author

Jem Poster has worked as an archaeologist and is now a University Lecturer in Literature at Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education. Since 1998 he has also been Director of the department's Diploma in Creative Writing. His poetry has won awards in major competitions and he is the author of a selection of George Crabbe's poetry, a study of the poetry of the 1930s, and articles on modern poetry and fiction. His first full-length collection, Brought to Light, was published in 2001. Courting Shadows is his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In Poster's dazzling debut, set amid the Victorian gloom of 1881, snobbish John Stannard leads the restoration of a small, architecturally undistinguished church in a remote British village. It's unglamorous work that the young architect thinks beneath him, what with having to disinter corpses, fend off enraged townsfolk and dole out 19th-century workers comp to injured laborers. Further complicating Stannard's effort is the church's curate, Mr. Banks, who seeks to preserve all of what Stannard aims to modernize and improve, no matter how rotten or broken. The debate between the two men escalates when, stripping plaster from a wall, one of Stannard's employees uncovers a Doom Painting—a folk mural blending Christian and pagan influences dating from medieval times. At the same time, the buttoned-up Stannard begins to experience previously unknown passion, falling for the beautiful 19-year-old Ann Rosewell, an emigmatic local woman. The variously grotesque characters are spot-on, as is the static, lugubrious setting. Poster, who has worked as an archeologist, is formidable in his command of Victorian architecture and restoration, and uses his skills to construct an unlikely, subtext-ridden conflict—over the possibility of restoration to some original state of grace—that is wholly involving from start to finish. (Feb.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: London: Sceptre
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0340822570
• ISBN 13: 9780340822579
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256