A Shock

Ever since Keith Ridgway published his landmark cult novel Hawthorn & Child, his ardent fans have yearned for more

Finally, Ridgway gives us A Shock, his thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good new novel.
      Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it’s at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They’re on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending.
      Perhaps Ridgway’s most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell―he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don’t know what time it is…

Keith Ridgway is a Dubliner living in London. His previous novels include A Shock (winner of the 2022 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction), Hawthorn & Child, and Animals. He has also been awarded the Prix Fémina Étranger and Premier Roman Étranger, the O Henry Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His books have been acclaimed "ingeniously slippery” (Lucy Scholes, New York Times Book Review),  “bleak, hilarious, chilling and hopeful” (Louie Conway, Vanity Fair), and "like Finnegans Wake, only readable” (John Self, London Times).