From award-winning writer David Park, an absorbing account of the lives of the women most important to three poets: William Blake, Osip Mandlestam and an imagined contemporary Irish poet
David Park has written eight previous books including The Big Snow, Swallowing the Sun, The Truth Commissioner and, most recently, The Light of Amsterdam. He has won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the University of Ulster's McCrea Literary Award, three times. He has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award three times. In 2014 he was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.
He writes prose of gravity and grace ... Line for line, it is hard
to think of a more skilful contemporary Irish novelist. He shares
with John McGahern a refusal of cheap flamboyance, with Dermot
Bolger a sense of suppressed fury … There is a Coetzeean accuracy
to the writing
*Joseph O’Connor, Guardian*
Recent years have seen an explosion of books about wives of famous
men ... The Poets’ Wives ... Is a fine contribution to this genre
... The Poets’ Wives is a marvellous triptych: lyrical, respectful
of creativity but also sharply sceptical
*David Grylls, Sunday Times *
Sparse, lyrical and yet clear-headed prose leaves no room for false
notes, nostalgia or self-serving mythologies. One of the quiet men
of Irish writing, he also possesses one of its truest voices and
has built up a deeply impressive oeuvre without fuss or
pyrotechnics ... infused with the depth of character and emotion
that are hallmarks of his work as a novelist of enormous
sensitivity
*Irish Mail on Sunday*
Marvellous
*Sunday Times Must Reads*
Intriguing and impressive ... With its stylistic felicity ... its
concern with integrity and with upholders of humane, and humanistic
values, The Poets' Wives displays without ostentation its author's
resourcefulness and versatility
*Patricia Craig, Times Literary Supplement*
An outstanding novel, written in luminous accessible prose,
thoroughly enjoyable and much deeper even than the sum of its
excellent parts
*Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Irish Times*
Beautifully wrought
*Independent on Sunday*
Intensely evocative, thought-provoking
*Observer*
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