Communion Town
by:
Sam Thompson (author)
The Man Booker longlisted Communion Town reveals the shadows and sinister inhabitants of a city that never appears the same way twice. On crowded streets, in the town squares and half-empty tower blocks, the lonely and lost try to make a connection. A weary gumshoe pounds the reeking sidewalks,...
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The Man Booker longlisted Communion Town reveals the shadows and sinister inhabitants of a city that never appears the same way twice. On crowded streets, in the town squares and half-empty tower blocks, the lonely and lost try to make a connection. A weary gumshoe pounds the reeking sidewalks, seeking someone he knows he will never find. Violence loiters in blind alleys, eager to embrace the unsuspecting and the reckless. Lovers are doomed to follow treacherous paths that were laid long before they first met. This city is no ordinary place. Here, the underworld has surfaced; dreams melt into reality and memories are imagined before they are lived. Ghosts and monsters, refugees and travellers - the voices of Communion Town clamour to tell the stories of the city, stories that must be heard to be believed.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780007454778 (0007454775)
Publish date: January 31st 2013
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Pages no: 278
Edition language: English
I first heard about this one from Christopher Priest on his blog. That probably should have been sufficient warning (I mean that in a nice way). This book is billed as a story of "a city in ten chapters", by which it's a set of interconnected short stories set in a fictional city. It's well writt...
My life was on hold the second I picked this book up. What a mightily impressive debut. A series of ten short stories all set in one fictionalised, timeless city. While there are some shared threads between the stories, they are tenuous to say the least. As with all short story collections, the...
Brilliantly rendered prose. This is a rich complex network of stories which are supposedly subtly linked, but for the most part I couldn't see those relationships. The stories require vigilance and concentration. Reading the stories of Communion Town was to constantly be reminded that the reader ...