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Synopsis
It's market day in an English city two years into the Great War. The farmers are coming in from the country, the cattle are being driven through the streets and that evening a trainload of wounded soldiers is due to arrive.
At the local mansion, its new hospital tents to the ready, waits Montague Beckwith, himself a psychological casualty of the war. In the town's poorest quarter, Winnie Barley prays that Walter, her missing son, will be on the train (but that her violent husband is not). In the pharmacy, Gertie Dobson dreams of romance while her father keeps unsuitable men at bay. And everywhere is Walter, a ghostly presence who watches as the girl he loved from a distance is drawn into Montague's orbit.
Weaving together multiple viewpoints, Andrew Cowan creates a panoramic, extraordinarily vivid portrait of a place as individual as it is archetypal. Here is a community where the war permeates high and low; where the factory now produces barbed wire, the women are doing the men's jobs, and the young men are no longer so eager to answer the King's call. And here is the tragic story of a casual betrayal, and a boy who proved that those at the bottom of the heap - the worthless ones - could be the most valiant of them all.
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Review
PRAISE FOR PIG (.)
A coming-of-age story as strange and surprising, in its way, as THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (New York Times)
A first novel of extraordinary poise and accomplishment, treating a boy's coming of age amid the squalid realities of the new British underclass with a delicacy and lyricism which is both gripping and moving (Michael Dibdin)
The detail is immaculately recorded; the effect is heartbreaking (Louisa Young, Sunday Times)
[A] wholly satisfying book, quietly beautiful and inescapably ominous (David Buckley, Observer)
Beautifully evoked ... Cowan writes with a deceptive simplicity (Amanda Craig, The Times)
PRAISE FOR WHAT I KNOW (.)
Elusive, strange and complex . . . an emotionally and philosophically rich existential private eye novel . . . Slowly, with great subtlety and skill, Cowan . . . explores the private battles that rage silently in every home (William Sutcliffe, Guardian)
Gripping. We are mesmerised by its smoothness of plot and prose, perfectly designed to make the odd and the irregular stand out with intensity . . . Cowan has succeeded in making the ordinary incredibly engrossing - something that many try to do but few do well. (Scotland on Sunday)
Its willed restraint and implicit solitude are wonderfully sustained . . . a masterclass in intimate understatement which proves that the brain is indeed our most erotic organ and the imagination its muse. (Scotsman)
Book Description
A novel about the First World War that is as mesmerising as it is unusual, a triumphant new work by one of the most acclaimed writers of the 90s.
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- PublisherSceptre
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1444759418
- ISBN 13 9781444759419
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages272
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Worthless Men
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