This Is Memorial Device - Softcover

Keenan, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571330851 ISBN 13: 9780571330850

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2018

Synopsis

A TELEGRAPH AND ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE
ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTH
LRB BOOK OF THE WEEK
CAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTH

Ross Raymond and Johnny McLaughlin are two fanboys dedicated to the Airdrie post-punk scene of the early '80s - the glory years - when anything and everything seemed possible. Looking back on that time - the people, the bands, the underground legends - they piece together a story which has at its core Memorial Device, the greatest band you've never heard of. Featuring a cast of misfits, artists, drop-outs, small-town visionaries and musicians, This Is Memorial Device is a dark, witty novel depicting a moment where art and the demands it makes are as serious as life itself.

About this title

Review:

The best NEW BOOK I read all year was THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE by DAVID KEENAN, which seemed to find a new way of telling a story, a kind of fabricated docu-fiction, and gave utterly vivid three-dimensional life to a community of outsider artists in a small Scottish town at the start of the '80s. It also made me think about memory, reality and how thoughts and ideas work. I felt imaginatively alive while reading it and oddly bereft when it ended. -- Stewart Lee

I wanted to live in this book as it raced along. -- Kim Gordon

One of the most acute, affecting and aphoristic novels of recent years . . . Hallucinatory and haunting., Guardian

To say I enjoyed it would be a massive understatement; it's an incredible book, savage and tender and poignant and mad. -- Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies

Captures the terrific, obsessive, ludicrous pomposity of every music fan's youth in an utterly definitive way. -- Irvine Welsh

Full of music and mystery and myth . . . dark, dreamy and delirious., Herald

I couldn't really like anybody who doesn't love this book. It's the sound of young Scotland distilled forever. -- Andrew O'Hagan

A magnificent debut novel., Wire

I don't often recommend a novel after reading only a hundred pages, but I will make an exception for This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan. . . . It captures the utter seriousness, the all-consuming belief, the sacrifice to art, the veneration of ideas that was as true for a shonky band in Airdrie in 1984 as it was for David Bowie in 1967, or Man Ray in 1915, or Gustav Mahler in 1884. -- Kenny Farquharson, The Times

Entirely exhilarating, constantly threatening to spin free of its axis and yet always hauled back by its author's command of his tune., i Independent

Book Description:

WINNER OF THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE FOR A DEBUT NOVEL
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE
ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTH
LRB BOOK OF THE WEEK
CAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTH
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COLLYER BRISTOW PRIZE

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0571330851
• ISBN 13: 9780571330850
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304