A Book Of Death And Fish - Hardcover

Ian Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1908643668 ISBN 13: 9781908643667

Publisher: Saraband, 2014

Synopsis

Peter MacAulay sits down to write his will.
 The process sets in motion a compulsive series of reflections: a history of his own lifetime and a subjective account of how key events in the post-war world filter through to his home, Stornoway. He reveals his passions for history, engines and fish, and witnesses changing times - and things that don't change - in the Hebrides.

The novel is driven by its idiosyncratic narrator, but with counterpoints from people he engages with - his father, mother, wife, daughter, friends. It's all about stories, a litany of small histories witnessed during one very individual lifetime.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Stephen is a writer, storyteller, artist and sailor from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. His prose, poetry and drama has been published around the world and garnered several awards, including the Robert Louis Stevenson Award. He was the first artist-in-residence at StAnza, Scotland's annual poetry festival.

Review

"It is a Waterland for the Outer Hebrides...it's a major landmark in fiction of the islands...it's a landmark in Scottish literature and contemporary fiction more broadly...makes cunning shifts into para-memoir, pseudo-biography, hints of the documentary, but it's always mobile, always moving. Line for line, the voice was so lively, so inventive, that I relished each paragraph ... Story within story, concentrically nested, or maybe hung like hooks on a line to catch the readers... It's a bright and vivid and true book, and a work of literature, unmistakably." - Robert Macfarlane. "It's absorbing and riveting. There's not a single paragraph in A Book of Death and Fish when we are not engaged by the vigour and jump and insistence of his voice." - The Guardian. "Stephen brings a contained concentration and intensity to his chapters that is mesmerizing and true in a deeper way." - The Scotsman. "Dense, compelling and wildly idiosyncratic, it's a novel that splits the form open like a fresh catch, glistening and raw and singing with the sea." - Kirsty Gunn. "A Book Of Death And Fish may well take its place beside Moby-Dick...It will, I suspect, be one of those books I will not put down all my days." - Candia McWilliam

Edition details

• Publisher: Saraband
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908643668
• ISBN 13: 9781908643667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 540