Gorsky: A Novel - Softcover

Goldsworthy, Vesna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1468313622 ISBN 13: 9781468313628

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2016

Synopsis

On a rainy afternoon in London’s old Chelsea, a charming multi-billionaire Russian oligarch, Gorsky, walks into an ailing bookshop and writes the first of several quarter-of-a-million pound checks. With that money, Gorsky has tasked Nikola, the store’s bored and brilliant clerk, with sourcing books for a massive personal library, which which will be housed in the magnificent, palatial home Gorsky happens to be building immediately next to Nikola’s own modest dwelling. Gorsky needs a tasteful collection of Russian literature to woo a long-lost love―no matter that she happens to be married to an Englishman. His passion for her surpasses even his immeasurable wealth, and Nikola will be drawn into a world of opulence, greed, capitalism, sex, and beauty as he helps Gorsky pursue this doomed love. Charmingly written and inspired by The Great Gatsby, Gorsky is a vicarious thrill―an ode to cosmopolitan taste and a brilliant reimagining of a powerful classic.

About this title

About the Author

Vesna Goldsworthy is a Serbian poet and writer living in London. She is author of three books: Inventing Ruritania; a memoir of her childhood in Yugoslavia, Chernobyl Strawberries, which was published to great acclaim in 2005 by Atlantic; and the Crashaw Prize-winning poetry collection, The Angel of Salonika (2011), greeted by the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee as "a welcome new voice in English poetry", and one of The Times Poetry Books of the Year.

Review

“An impressively accomplished retelling of the Gatsby story...From the beginning, Vesna Goldsworthy impresses with the precision of her prose, the control of her narrative, and her turn of phrase.”
- LA Review of Books

“It’s an accomplished retelling of an American classic. Indeed, it’s amazing that Vesna Goldsworthy’s excellent new novel Gorsky is the first full scale re-working of [The Great Gatsby]...More importantly, and more interestingly, this clever re-telling underlines how delicately balanced a thing is Gatsby and sheds light on how the novel works.”
- Tablet

“It’s a very clever idea: to update "The Great Gatsby” by making the bootlegger into a Russian arms-dealing billionaire and transplanting the action from Jazz Age New York to 21st-century London, a city increasingly shaped by global wealth.”
- The New York Times Book Review

“Entertaining . . . Overall, the novel is fun, deviating just enough from The Great Gatsby and remaining similar at the same time to work for the overall narrative.”
- New York Journal of Books

“Gorsky has got love, sex, murder, yet beneath all that its not-so-secret passion is literary―fittingly, for a book based on a book... [A] kind of novel-length love letter to the written word.”
- Jewish Book Council

About this edition

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1468313622
• ISBN 13: 9781468313628
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288