Gabriel's Lament - Softcover

Paul Bailey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857025881 ISBN 13: 9781857025880

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1998

Synopsis

Gabriel Harvey looks back on his tortured relationships with his father and the mysterious disappearance of his mother

About this title

From Library Journal:

Bailey has fashioned an awkward buildungsroman in this, his sixth novel and the first to be published in America. The young man is Gabriel Harvey, an aspiring writer who believes his eccentricity and isolation are due to the dark influences of an uneducated, boorish father and a mother who disappeared when he was 13. The people Gabriel meets when he leaves home offer glimpses of the poorer classes in London, but they never become more than caricatures. Gabriel himself is a pale presence, becoming so obsessed with the memory of his mother that he imagines conversations with her ghost. The prose style is strained, either too precious or too tinged with self-pity to evoke pathos. Not a recommended purchase. Lucinda Ann Peck, Learning Design Associates, Gahanna, Ohio
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this "exotic" treatment of English eccentricity at its manic extreme, the reticent narrator, Gabriel Harvey, tells of his agonized efforts to come to terms with the loss of his mother, and of his appalling father. PW lauded Bailey's shining dialogue and his "word-perfect" character sketches.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1857025881
• ISBN 13: 9781857025880
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336