Alphabet - Softcover

Page, Kathy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1927428939 ISBN 13: 9781927428931

Publisher: Biblioasis, 2014

Synopsis

"Simply an epiphany." Kirkus, starred review

Simon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. Waste of Space. Bastard. A Threat to Women. Murderer. Facing a lifetime behind bars and subjected to new therapies for sexual reprogramming, Simon finds himself plunged into a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. But how much, in the end, can a man really change? Darkly compelling and deeply moving, Alphabet is a psychological exploration of one man’s uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation.

"Intense, revealing, challenging and above all riveting I kept saying to myself, how could she know this?” Erwin James, convicted murderer, author of A Life Inside: A Prisoner’s Notebook

Sometimes novelists go too far and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go.” Time Out UK

Praise for Kathy Page

Her unforgettable prose is moody, shape-shifting, provocative and always as compelling as a strong light at the end of a road you hesitate to walk down...but will.” Amy Bloom, author of Where the God of Love Hangs Out

Marvellously well-crafted I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel.” Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet

About this title

From the Back Cover

"Moody, shape-shifting, provocative and always as compelling as a strong light at the end of a road you hesitate to walk down...but will." - Amy Bloom "I can't remember the last time I was so compelled, impressed and unsettled by the emotional world of a novel." - Sarah Waters "Kathy Page is a massive talent: wise, smart, very funny and very humane." - Barbara Gowdy "Sometimes novelists go too far - and sometimes they manage to demonstrate that too far is the place they needed to go." - Time Out, UK "Page's writing ... is lit with an immediate sense of period, summoning images which are by turns softly painterly, sharply filmic or as murky as those first television images of the moon landing." - Times Literary Supplement Simon Austen has the names people have called him tattooed all over his body. Dumb Cunt. Waste of Space. A Threat to Women. Murderer. Simon Austen has strangled his girlfriend. For the next thirteen years, Simon Austen will be serving life. Barely out of his teens, his past a grim assembly of foster homes, Simon is cagey, reserved, and highly intelligent. He's been told he has trouble relating to women. But what kind of woman would want to relate to him? Determined to resolve his issues on his own terms, and at great personal risk, Simon begins writing illicit letters to women under assumed identities. And though short-lived, his letter-writing triggers a terrifying process of self-reconstruction. Who is Simon Austen, he is forced to ask, and who do his psychiatrists want him to become? A jolting portrait of modern prison regimes, Alphabet is the story of a man's uncertain and often-harrowing journey towards rehabilitation.

About the Author

Kathy Page is the author of seven novels, including The Story of My Face (longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2002), and The Find (shorlisted for the ReLit Award in 2011), as well as many short stories, previously collected in As In Music and Paradise & Elsewhere (Biblioasis 2013). She recently co-edited In the Flesh (2012), a collection of personal essays about the human body, and has written for television and radio. Born in the UK, Kathy has lived on Salt Spring Island since 2001.

About this edition

• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1927428939
• ISBN 13: 9781927428931
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304