Show Me the Sky: A Novel - Softcover

Hogg, Nicholas

3.24 out of 5 stars

59 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847671896 ISBN 13: 9781847671899

Publisher: Canongate U.S., 2009

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Time is running out for detective James Dent. After having spent a year on the trail of the missing British rock star Billy K, he and his team have exhausted every lead. His relentless search has already cost him both family and home, but Dent decides to go it alone. Abandoning his job at the Missing Persons Bureau, Dent boards a plane to Australia with nothing but a page torn from Show Me the Sky, the 1834 journal of a Fijian missionary—the book Billy K was reading when he vanished.
From the love letter of a stranded motorcyclist in central Australia to the back streets and brothels of Mombasa, Dent’s search leads him across continents and into the past. As Dent begins to piece these parts of the puzzle together with Billy’s disappearance, he recalls his own past as a teenage fugitive, considering why a man might walk away from his own life, and leaving him to wonder if he is trailing a man, a ghost, or himself.
Somewhere between adventure story, historical voyage, and a quest for self-discovery, Show Me the Sky is an ambitiously crafted debut novel bringing four riveting narrative threads together into an unforgettable ride.

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About the Author

Nicholas Hogg was born in Leicester in 1974. After studying psychology, he travelled widely, living in Japan, Fiji and America and he taught literacy skills to refugees in London. In 2005 he won the New Writing Ventures prize for fiction. Show Me The Sky is his first novel.

From Booklist

This ambitious first novel by British writer Hogg moves back and forth in time and across several continents, offering multiple narrative strands and characters. The novel’s central arc follows Detective James Dent, who has spent the last year on the hunt for missing British rock star Billy K. Obsessed with the case, Dent abandons his job to track a final, desperate lead in Australia. Intercut with the hunt are passages from a journal Billy K was reading when he was last spotted. It contains the writing of nineteenth-century Fijian missionary Nelson Babbage, whose vivid rendering of colonial oppression forms the backbone of Hogg’s themes of identity and assimilation. Other narrative strands follow motorcycle rider Cal and the touching letters he pens to his girlfriend while slowly dying in the Australian Outback, and an exhausted teenage runaway who appears to be the teenage incarnation of Detective Dent. There is so much going on plotwise that the story never quite gels, yet its hybrid nature—it’s part thriller, part historical novel—and confident writing make for an intriguing read. --Joanne Wilkinson

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