The Aeronaut's Guide to Rapture

Campbell, Stuart

ISBN 10: 1910124931 / ISBN 13: 9781910124932

Published by Sandstone Press Ltd, 2016

About this Item

Seller Inventory # U9781910124932

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Aeronaut's Guide to Rapture

Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd

Publication Date: 2016

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: 36690166

Signed: 3/12/2024 10:44:08 PM

Edition: 1710283448.

About this title

Synopsis:

Three people in three countries in three different eras. Ursule in 1864 lives the life of a kitchen skivvy in Paris. Dexter in 1965 is an American GI in Vietnam. Dante in 2015 is a Catholic priest in Palermo, Sicily. For Ursule the Prussians are closing in. For Dexter it's the Vietcong. For Dante it is the mafia. How can they escape but, more than that, how can misery become rapture? In contemporary Britain a fourth person holds all the strings in his hands as he rises silently and gracefully above the earth. In this tour de force of imagination Stuart Campbell follows the brilliant John McPake and the Sea Beggars with a tale that defies time and gravity and takes the reader to a place few have ever been and fewer still come back from.

Review:

'Three balloon stories make up this novel. Central to each is a need for escape encapsulated in a moment of rapture as the individual begins to ascend to the skies. With a structure and a quirkiness reminiscent of Yann Martel's "High Mountains Of Portugal" this could be literary Marmite - a case of love it or hate it, but it manages to work for me.'-Nudge Books; 'Three stories from three different places, widely separated in space and time. And three utterly compelling central characters, who have much in common as they seek to escape the circumstances in which they find themselves and somehow carve out a better future.'-Undiscovered Scotland