The Last Kings of Sark: A Novel - Softcover

Rankin-Gee, Rosa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250068045 ISBN 13: 9781250068040

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2015

Synopsis

"My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy."Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island and the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She's been hired for the summer to tutor a rich local boy named Pip. But when Jude arrives, the family is unsettling. Pip is awkward, overly literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esmé casts a shadow over the house.Enter Sofi: the family's holiday cook, a magnetic, mercurial Polish girl with appalling kitchen hygiene, who sings to herself and sleeps naked. When the father of the family goes away on business, Pip's science lessons are replaced by midday rosé and scallop-smuggling, and summer begins. Soon something powerful starts to touch the three together.But those strange, golden weeks on Sark can't last forever. Later, in Paris, Normandy and London, they find themselves looking for the moment that changed everything.Compelling, sensual, and lyrical, The Last Kings of Sark by Rosa Rankin-Gee is a tale of complicated love, only children and missed opportunities, from an extraordinary new writer.

About this title

About the Author:

ROSA RANKIN-GEE grew up in Kensal Rise, London, but now lives by the Parc de Belleville in Paris. She's been named one of Esquire magazine's 75 Brilliant Young Brits', and in 2011, she won Shakespeare & Company's international Paris Literary Prize. Rosa runs a night-bird version of a Book Club, where up to 300 people come to swap books and drink cocktails in the former home of George Bizet. Her work has been profiled in the New York Times and The New Yorker among others.

Review:

“A luminous, enchanting novel about friendship, loss, and love. Exquisitely written, beautifully told, THE LAST KINGS OF SARK is a world I won't soon forget.” ―Anton DiSclafani, New York Times bestselling author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

“With THE LAST KINGS OF SARK, Rosa Rankin-Gee has woven an irresistible and heady spell of youth and summer, love and friendship. Her energetic prose and attention to sensual detail will keep you reading greedily until the last page and thinking about the characters long afterwards. What an enchanting debut.” ―Joanna Hershon, author of A Dual Inheritance and Swimming

“Rosa Rankin-Gee's The Last Kings of Sark is a cracklingly witty, earnestly heartbreaking novel about a young girl who is sent to be a tutor on a remote island as majestic and magical as Evelyn Waugh gone to Neverland. What begins as a reminiscence of a summer-to-remember, turns elegantly into a powerful story about what happens when you fall into a love that cannot be forgotten in three lifetimes.” ―Kristopher Jansma, author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Funny, vivid, bittersweet.” ―Ned Beauman, author of The Teleportation Accident

“Rosa Rankin-Gee is a sophisticated stylist and her prose feels sharp and sleek. This is a book full of friendship and adventure and love and pigeons which fly out from pineapples. Like every great novel, it has magic at its core. It feels very modern too, like it has been written by a writer of a new time. Rankin-Gee is a writer we will all want to read again and again.” ―Monique Roffey, author of The White Woman on the Green and Archipelago

“A stunningly well-written first novel.
” ―The Times, UK

“Lithe, shimmering novel. . . ends explosively, but also with extreme tenderness, an unforgettable finale.” ―The Guardian, UK

“The past and present join together in a tale of a summer love that weaves its tendrils around three young hearts and still grows there decades later . . . create[s] vital characters and paint[s] wonderfully with words . . . interesting and thought-provoking.” ―Kirkus

“Rankin-Gee's prose moves with a languid pace that vividly showcases Sark's – as well as her characters' – peculiarities . . . hidden surprises and a beautifully written, bittersweet ending pack a vivid emotional punch.” ―Publishers Weekly

“Exploration of sexual identity and upended expectations . . . sure to send readers into contemplation of loves long gone and left more appreciative of them. As in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the narrator's awareness of storytelling conventions create opportunities to reflect on how memories form, and fans of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife will enjoy the ebb and flow of time. Debut author Rankin-Gee's keen insights into romantic negotiations belie her youth. The confident narrative will be a shot in the arm for bored book club planners, and the fluid sexuality will be a welcome (if overdue) offering for readers of LGBT fiction.” ―Library Journal, starred review

“Rankin-Gee's tactile, mellifluous prose is on full display here, as the tiniest details help fully immerse readers in the otherworldly island setting . . . full of deep, unshakable bonds, twists of fate, and the power of nostalgia.” ―Booklist

“Freshly innocent and self-assured - each word seems chosen with extreme care.” ―New Yorker

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1250068045
• ISBN 13: 9781250068040
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288