One Boat - by Jonathan Buckley (Paperback)

About the Book

On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast - the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.

Book Synopsis

On losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast - the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. She immerses herself again in the life of the town, observing the inhabitants going about their business, a quiet backdrop for her reckoning with herself. An episode from her first visit resurfaces vividly - her encounter with John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew. Soon Teresa encounters some of the people she met last time around: Petros, an eccentric mechanic, whose life story may or may not be part of John's; the beautiful Niko, a diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt and responsibility.

Review Quotes

'A strange, sly and self-assured novel, in which both nothing and everything happens.... There is a great deal of freight on board One Boat, but it packs so neatly into 168 pages that it never feels overburdened. This is a novel to be returned to as a place in which to think, just as Teresa returns to her Greek town.'
-- Frances Wilson, Times Literary Supplement

'Always well crafted, this novel is engaging in parts and digressive in others, which adds to its realism, capturing how people chatter their way down alleys, rarely hewing to the main road of a tale.... The buildup in Tell is perpetual, a sense that an explanation must be coming. But the author diverges from expectations and converges on reality, where remembering is not the same as understanding. Abruptly, someone may just disappear, and all that remains is the sight of a figure wandering across a bridge -- no splash heard, just the fading ripples of "why."'
-- Tom Rachman, New York Times (praise for Tell)

'Buckley has once again staged an absorbing debate: a philosophical refusal of narrative linearity that is replete with stories; a constellation of episodes that does not tell the whole tale.'
-- Richard Robinson, Guardian (praise for Tell)

'Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.'
-- Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement

'Given that so many of Buckley's novels are concerned with ideas of memory, selfhood and storytelling, this is hardly new territory for him. Yet the interview conceit in Tell makes it feel fresh, the withholding of interiority requiring an unusual engagement. Don't take the conversational prose at face value; underneath it lies a whole other set of mysteries besides Curtis's. Pay attention and you'll find them.'
-- George Cochrane, Financial Times (praise for Tell)

'Tell is one of the best new novels I've read in a while.'
-- Benjamin Markovits, Telegraph (praise for Tell)

About the Author

Jonathan Buckley is a writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton. In 2015 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for 'Briar Road', and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His previous novel, Tell, was the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, a global, biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize. One Boat is his thirteenth novel, the second to come out with Fitzcarraldo Editions.