Showing results by author "David Keenan" in Literature & Fiction

David Keenan's cult classic novel, available in audiobook for the first time—read by the author. A Telegraph and Rough Trade Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize.

The much-anticipated prequel to Keenan's cult classic debut, This Is Memorial Device, Industry of Magic & Light is set in the same mythical Airdrie in the 1960s and early '70s and centres on a group of hippies running their own psychedelic light show. Told in two halves—the first in the form of an inventory of the contents of a caravan abandoned by one of the hippies, the second in the form of a tarot card reading—it is not so much a book about the 1960s as a direct channelling of the decade's energies.

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranean that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day.

Set between Moscow, Russia and St Andrews, Scotland, it tackles the metaphysics of golf, the mindset of the classic Russian novels and the power of art and music to rewrite reality, as Aneliya comes into contact with an angelic presence named Xstabeth who simultaneously fulfils and disappears both her father and her lover. Written in a tender, mythical key, it is a love letter to the books of Chandler, Nabokov and Dostoevsky and also a musical text, with chord progressions appearing at key points in the action, so that the audiobook may be sung, played or otherwise accompanied.

Estamos en Irlanda del Norte en los convulsos años setenta. Sammy, Tommy, Barney y Patrick son cuatro amigos de Ardoyne, zona depauperada y de mayoría católica del norte de Belfast. También son «provos», miembros del IRA Provisional que abrazan devotamente la causa de una Irlanda libre y unida. Para ellos, la iniciación a la violencia y la iniciación a la vida son indistinguibles.