The Invention of Dr Cake - Hardcover

Motion, Sir Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571216315 ISBN 13: 9780571216314

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2003

Synopsis

To all appearances, Dr Cake is an unexceptional man.

After a period of study and practice in London, and several years travelling in Europe, he has chosen the life of a village doctor. He publishes regularly in medical journals and lives quietly and alone with his housekeeper. His extensive bookcase demonstrates a keen interest in poetry and drama, and indeed in everything he does, he shows himself a man of the widest sympathies. Locally, he is known for his great kindness to his patients. When he dies, the local church is full to overflowing with mourners.

But why, on the brass plate so ostentatiously screwed into his coffin-lid, is there no name?

About this title

Book Description:

The Invention of Dr Cake, by former poet laureate Andrew Motion, is a tantalising novel about poets and their afterlives.

About the Author:

Andrew Motion was Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and co-founder of the online Poetry Archive. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, and has published four celebrated biographies. His group study The Lamberts won the Somerset Maugham Award and his authorised life of Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Andrew Motion's novella The Invention of Dr Cake (2003) was described as 'amazingly clever' by the Irish Times and praised for 'brilliant and almost hallucinatory vividness' by the Sunday Telegraph. His memoir, In the Blood (2006), was described as 'the most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read' in the Independent on Sunday. His most recent collection of poems is The Customs House (2012). Andrew Motion was knighted for his services to poetry in 2009. In 2014 he received the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0571216315
• ISBN 13: 9780571216314
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160