The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story - Softcover

Buchan, James

2.13

38 ratings by Goodreads

9781847244680: The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847244688 ISBN 13: 9781847244680

Publisher: Quercus Publishing, 2008

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When mysterious loner Jim Smith moves into remote Paradise Farmhouse, he experiences some strange but wonderful midnight visits from an ethereal woman. He soon discovers that this dream-like figure is the incarnation of a 1960s beauty, immortalized in a famous nude portrait that belongs to his neighbour. Both unsettling ghost story and intense love story, 'The Gate of Air' is by turns poetic, learned, satirical and allegorical This is a beautifully crafted novel about love and loneliness, life and death, and the indelible traces we leave behind us when we die.

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Review:

'Not only a brilliant study of rural decay and the tragedy of the commons, but also both an unsettling ghost story and a strangely moving romance, and it succeeds beautifully on all those levels' John Burnside, The Times. (The Times)

Nobody - but nobody - tells a love story better - Paul Baily, Daily Telegraph. (Daily Telegraph)

...beguiling, poetic prose...a moving meditation on what it is to love - Daily Mail. (Daily Mail)

'A wayward and extraordinary ghost story which finds room for both a personal appearance by the goddess of love and a discourse on the political economy of the British countryside.' Evening Standard Books of the Year. (Evening Standard)

'Layers are peeled off the palimpsest of the English landscape, and of literature itself... the book's final paragraph is nothing short of magical... [Buchan] is a novelist who takes no literary convention for granted, and each book he writes is a discovery' Stephen Poole, Guardian. (Guardian)

I don't believe this country has a better writer to offer than James Buchan - Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books. (London Review of Books)

From the Back Cover:

Jim Smith, ousted by City financiers from his computer software company, retreats to an old farmhouse in the remote West of England. Though he knows nothing of country life, he takes on livestock and crops, a dog, and a labourer of mysterious and independent habits.
One night Jim is visited by convulsive dreams of a beautiful woman, and at dinner with the local magnate, he sees a ghost. His pastoral idyll disintegrates. All the certainties and reassurances of modern life vanish, and Jim must deal alone with elemental and implacable forces as old as his fields and woods.
The Gate of Air is both an exploration of a disturbed modernity and a fireside spine-chiller of Victorian vigour and conviction.

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