Peace Talks - by Tim Finch (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Book Awards

A small masterpiece of compression and containment, Peace Talks tells the story of one man's grief, the tribulations of the human heart, and our longing for peace.

Edvard Behrends is a highly regarded senior diplomat who has made his reputation as a mediator in international peace negotiations. In his latest post, he has been sent to a resort hotel in the Tyrol. High up on this mountain, the air is bright and clear. When he isn't working, Edvard reads, walks, listens to music. He confides in no one--no one but his wife Anna. Anna, whom he loves with all his heart; Anna, always present and yet forever absent.

Reminiscent of Robert Seethaler's work in its formal elegance and emotional heft, of Rachel Cusk's novels in the precision and tenacity of its prose, and of David Szalay's writing in its abiding preoccupations, Finch's new novel is a work of great depth, honesty, wit, beauty, and enduring importance.

Review Quotes

Praise for Peace Talks

"Laced with humor and sadness, this is an intimate account of what it means to make peace, both with others and with oneself."--Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

"A lucid work carefully balanced between the terrors and consolations that fiction can provide."--Kirkus Reviews

"A moving and direct study of frailty, love and time, and luck and grief, of what is left when all the noise - of machination, violence and competing stories - is stripped away."--Aida Edemariam, The Guardian

"What we are reading in Edvard's personal peace talk are the words that fill his own silence...Peace Talks is a feat of telling this nothing, of articulating the mundanity and penetrating the emptiness of grief."--Emily Rhodes, The Spectator

"Insightful, emotionally resonant and unexpectedly poetic."--The Big Issue

"[Peace Talks] offers a tender and elegant portrait of a grieving individual searching for personal and political peace."--The Times

"Tim Finch's elegant and wintry novel has something of the feel of early Kazuo Ishiguro, and a similar acute grasp of both character and situation, aided by the author's background in refugee and migrant charities."--The Observer

"A smart tale slyly engineered to warn against the perils of nationalist tub-thumping."--The Daily Mail

Praise for The House of the Journalists

"An ambitious, black-hued satire . . . Lingers in the imagination."--Olivia Laing, New Statesman

"Evocative and clever."--The New York Times

"A strange but oddly effective mixture of often-light comedy and often-brutal reportage from the front line against tyranny."--Harry Ritchie, The Daily Mail

"Savagely funny."--Metro

"An astonishingly good book."--Emerald Street