Shortlisted for the 2013 RSL Ondaatje Prize.
A sharp, clever, violent novel spanning the transition of South Africa from apartheid through Truth and Reconciliation to the present as seen by three characters living in those traumatic times. Pacey, it grips attention as it juggles time and person, old and new country and left me deeply saddened by the descriptions of South Africa today and the need for so much personal security.
Click here to see Patrick Flanery's new book, Fallen Land, due out in hardback on 1 May 2013.
The Lovereading view...
This is a very confident debut novel that manages to be literary yet a page-turner at the same time. The author has said that he is influenced by the award winning writer and anyone who has read Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin will find echoes of it in his complex interwoven plot and themes of confronting your past. Interestingly, however, Flanery has said he didn’t read The Blind Assassin until a few months after finishing Absolution. Anecdotes aside this story, set in South Africa, of two novelists sharing a past and one writing the biography of the other is compelling and captivating.
Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2012.
FROM ARTICLE IN GUARDIAN 26TH NOV 2012. AUTHOR FAVOURITES OF 2012:
A S Byatt - 'Patrick Flanery's Absolution (Atlantic) is a wonderfully constructed and gripping novel about betrayal and shadows in South Africa.'
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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In this stunning literary debut, Patrick Flanery delivers a devastating and intimate portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, and the perils of taking sides when the sides are changing around you.Told in shifting perspectives, Absolution is centred on the mysterious character of Clare Wald, a controversial writer of great fame, haunted by the memories of a sister she fears she betrayed to her death and a daughter she fears she abandoned. Clare comes to learn that in this conflict the dead do not stay buried, and the missing return in other forms--such as the small child present in her daughter's last days who has reappeared, posing as Clare's official biographer. Sam Leroux, a South African expatriate returning to Cape Town after many years in New York, gradually earns Clare's trust, his own ghosts emerging from the histories that he and Clare begin to unravel, leading them both along a path in search of reconciliation and forgiveness.From the Hardcover edition.
Absolution features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Debut Books of the Month, Family Drama, Book Club Recommendations, eBooks of the Month, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations, Romance / Relationship Stories
Absolution is available in Paperback, Ebook, Hardback
Absolution was written by Patrick Flanery and published by Knopf Canada
£25.20
