Quilt - by Nicholas Royle (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Nicholas Royle challenges and experiments with literary form to forge a new mode of storytelling that is both playful and inquisitive. Tender, absorbing and at times shockingly funny, this extraordinary novel is both mystery and love story. It confronts the mad hand of grief while embracing the endless possibilities of language. Facing the disarray and disorientation around his father's death, a man contends with the strange and haunting power of the house his parents once lived in. He sets about the mundane yet exhausting process of sorting through the remnants of his father's life - clearing away years of accumulated objects, unearthing forgotten memories and the haunted realms of everyday life. At the same time, he embarks on an eccentric side-project. And as he grows increasingly obsessed with this new project, his grip on reality seems to slip. Nicholas Royle is also the author of An English Guide to Birdwatching (Myriad, 2017).

Review Quotes

'It is quiet, lapidary, and teases out the tangled filaments that link figuration to fact and insight to feeling with the unnerving stealth of a submarine predator.' - Will Self

'A highly readable and stunningly original experiment in literary form.' - Leo Bersani

'A work of remarkable imaginative energy.' - Frank Kermode

'Royle's baroque, athletic prose... confers a strong sense of the "strangeness" of English... moments of delightfully eccentric humour and impressive linguistic experimentalism.' - Observer

'It is in those commonplace moments at the end of a life... moments which Nicholas Royle describes with such piercing accuracy, when this novel is truly at its strangest.' - Times Literary Supplement

'Shifts in point of view have a sort of fairground quality to them, suddenly lurching, demanding your compliance, but it is the way the storyline ultimately develops that takes the breath away.' - New Statesman

'Strange, surprising, sui generis... [shows] determination not to leave the reader feeling that the end of the text is the end of the reading experience.' - John Self, The Asylum

'A book of mythological power. Quilt is unforgettable, like all those great pieces of fiction that are fed by our immemorial root system, the human dream of metamorphosis.' - Hélène Cixous

'An experimental and studied look at mourning... Playful, clever and perceptive.' - Big Issue

'Thoughtful, intelligent, exploratory... There's powerful emotional warmth and engagement as well as an infectious delight in words... It's an exciting development for English novel-readers.' - Sarah Wood

'Subtle and eloquent writing. [Royle's] first novel is an intelligent and lyrical account of mourning, madness and manta rays.' - Martin McQuillan

'Remarkable, the vocabulary is rich and unusual.' - Manhattenchester

'An inventive, risky piece of writing, which succeeds because of the way in which it combines flights of imagination with the sense of a powerful emotional reality.' - The Hungry Reader

'An experiment, a curiosity... a stirring manifesto addressing the future of the novel itself... like Myriad's other releases this book has an assured seal of quality from the very first line.' - Booksquawk

About the Author

Nicholas Royle is a Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He has written numerous books on literature and critical theory, including E.M. Forster, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (with Andrew Bennett), Telepathy and Literature, and The Uncanny.