Author(s): James Buchan

Fiction

When mysterious loner Jim Smith moves into remote Paradise Farmhouse, he experiences some strange but wonderful midnight visits from an ethereal woman. He soon discovers that this dream-like figure is the incarnation of a 1960s beauty, immortalized in a famous nude portrait that belongs to his neighbour. Intrigued, Jim abandons his customary aloofness to find out more, and accepts a dinner invitation from his landlords - a billionaire-thug and his beautiful but mistreated wife.The dinner party - a chance for a brilliantly satirical sketch of the braying upper class hunting set - is disastrous and, soon after, Jim's pastoral idyll disintegrates. His lambs die, cows give no milk, bees swarm. Sensing his ghostly lover has turned malevolent, Jim knows he must placate her before the circle of decay reaches those he loves - even if that means making the ultimate sacrifice. Both unsettling ghost story and intense love story, "The Gate of Air" is by turns poetic, learned, satirical and allegorical. This is a beautifully crafted novel about love and loneliness, life and death, and the indelible traces we leave behind us when we die. Review: I don't believe this country has a better writer to offer than James Buchan - Michael Hofmann, London Review of Books...one of our finest writers, a master of narrative and of social observation A... the astonishing thing about this wonderful novel is that is not only a brilliant study of rural decay and the tragedy of the commons, but also both an unsettling ghost story and a strangely moving romance, and it succeeds beautifully on all those levels - The Times First published 2008.