Red Shift
Author(s): Alan Garner
In second-century Britain, Macey and a gang of fellow deserters from the Roman army hunt and are hunted by deadly local tribes. Fifteen centuries later, during the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley hides from the ruthless troops who have encircled his village. And in contemporary Britain, Tom, a precocious, love-struck, mentally unstable teenager, struggles to cope with the imminent departure for London of his girlfriend, Jan.
Three separate stories, three utterly different lives, distant in time and yet strangely linked to a single place, the mysterious, looming outcrop known as Mow Cop, and a single object, the blunt head of a stone axe: all these come together in Alan Garner's extraordinary "Red Shift," a pyrotechnical and deeply moving elaboration on themes of chance and fate, time and eternity, visionary awakening and destructive madness.
Product Information
""Red Shift," with its passionately bickering adolescent lovers and its vertiginous plunges through the wormhole of time, shook me to the core every time I read it, and still does. . . . More than any orthodox work of historical fiction, it was this weird fantasy novel which taught me to look beyond the walls of my own era, my own reality. Garner makes the past numinous, terrifyingly real: anything but passed."
--Emma Donoghue
"Garner squeezes language into depth charges which will detonate emotions at a level where words cannot reach."
--"The Listener"
"A bitter, complex, brilliant book." --Ursula Le Guin
"Long before Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling there was Alan Garner, a children's author who crossed the boundaries between real and imaginary worlds--and between a young and an adult readership."
--"The Times "(London) list of the 50 greatest British postwar writers
"A work of poetic imagination that will keep any adult mind at full stretch."
General Fields
- :
- : New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
- : New York Review of Books
- : 0.082
- : 01 October 2011
- : 203mm X 130mm X 17mm
- : United States
- : books
Special Fields
- : 197
- : 1011
- : Paperback / softback
- : Alan Garner
