Darke

by Rick Gekoski

Overview

Dr James Darke has expelled himself from the world. He writes compulsively in his "coming-of-old-age" journal; he eats little, and drinks and smokes a lot. Meditating on what he has lost - the loves of his life, both dead and alive - he tries to console himself with the wisdom of the great thinkers and poets, yet finds nothing but disappointment. But cracks of light appear in his carefully managed darkness, and he begins to emerge from his self-imposed exile, drawn by the tender, bruised filaments of love for his daughter and grandson...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782119395
Publisher:	Canongate Books
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Edition description:	Main
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Rick Gekoski is a writer, rare-book dealer and academic. He has written several widely praised non-fiction books including Staying Up , Tolkien's Gown , Outside of a Dog and Lost, Stolen or Shredded . This is his first novel.

In 2005 he was one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize, and was then Chair of the judges for the Man Booker International Prize 2011. He teaches creative non-fiction for the Arvon Foundation, and sits on their Development Board. In 2010 he was elected a Trustee of English PEN.

Editorial Reviews

Debut delight . . . Just how this gleefully conjured misanthrope came to wall himself off from the world is the mystery at the heart of a singular first novel that evolves into a moving meditation on loss and redemption

Mail on Sunday

A supreme example of a natural and gifted storyteller

Colm Toibin

A wondrous book with two fathers, Kingsley Amis and Dante

Sebastian Barry

Makes for dark, thrilling reading . . . In James Darke, Gekoski has created a powerful, raging voice

Spectator

An original and bleakly funny portrait of grief

Economist

Surprising . . . with a warmth that is genuinely and unexpectedly moving

Guardian

I was beguiled and charmed by the vivid personality being revealed. By that, and by the fact that I couldn't stop reading. Gekoski puts words together with a sure touch and deep craftsmanship

Philip Pullman

Stuffed with more wisdom, bile, wit and tenderness than many writers create in a lifetime. In James Darke we have a hero as troubled and eternal as King Lear . . . And in Rick Gekoski we have a late-flowering genius of a novelist who proves it's never too late to start a glittering career in fiction

The Times

Rick Gekoski's impressive debut novel . . . Darke is both a tender and hard-hitting examination of grief and the slow, singular healing process . . . A brilliantly vivid creation . . . life-affirming and life-shattering

The Herald

An immensely enjoyable elegy . . . done with precision and patience

The Scotsman - Stuart Kelly

A coming-of-old-age journal which is full of advice on how to live and how to die

Books to Look Out For In 2017 Irish Times

Staggeringly accomplished. Heartbreakingly true. A shockingly monumental first novel

JOHN NIVEN

A wondrous book with two fathers, Kingsley Amis and Dante

SEBASTIAN BARRY

A very good storyteller

Sunday Telegraph

★ 10/15/2017
Entertainingly irascible and curmudgeonly, thin-skinned and misanthropic, Dr. James Darke lives alone after the death of his wife, feigning deafness to avoid conversing with the handyman, firing a cleaning lady who's become too bubbly, fuming with upper-crust British prejudices, and behaving badly toward the neighbors' barking dog. He was ever thus—as a schoolmaster, he got in trouble for keeping notes on his students' various defects as a way to remember their names—but now he's worse. He's even told George, the only person he could consider a friend, to collect his mail and then toss it, and he's not speaking to daughter Lucy, whom he nevertheless recalls tenderly throughout the narrative. He's also started keeping a coming-of-old-age journal, not an entirely bad idea. But when George shows up, pleading with him to respond to his daughter's increasingly distraught letters, Darke does something of a turnaround, getting past Lucy's initial anger and frustration to bond with his grandson. If that sounds sentimental, it isn't; this is a tough-minded and bracing novel about life's final moments from rare book dealer and academic Gekoski, writing his first novel, and it's a success. VERDICT A page-turning portrait of the most difficult character you'll be glad to claim as a friend.

Library Journal