Patrick McGuinness

A young woman has been murdered, and a neighbour, a retired teacher from Chapleton College, is arrested. An eccentric loner – intellectual, shy, a fastidious dresser with expensive tastes – he is the perfect candidate for a media monstering. In custody he is interviewed by two detectives: the smart-talking, quick-witted Gary, and his watchful colleague, Ander. Ander is always watchful, but particularly now, because the man across the table is his former teacher – Michael Wolphram – whom he hasn’t seen in nearly 30 years.

Let me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccentrics, full of charm, menace and wonder. To the days before television, to Marie Bodard’s sweetshop, to the Nazi occupation and unexpected collaborators. To a place where one neighbour murders another over the misfortune of pigs and potatoes. To the hotel where the French poet Verlaine his lover Rimbaud, holed up whilst on the run from family, creditors and the law.

Set during Ceausescu's last hundred days in power, Patrick McGuinness's accomplished debut novel explores a world of danger, repression and corruption. When our narrator, a young English student with a damaged past and an uncertain future, arrives in Bucharest he finds himself in a job he never applied for. With duties that become increasingly ambiguous and precarious, he soon finds himself uncomfortably and often dangerously close to the eye of the storm. 

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The beauty and strangeness of inner landscapes is reflected in these powerful poems. As each poem tends to the intricacies of human experience, their focus on the fractal patterns within familiar structures the tree within the leaf, the series of recurrences that unfold to create a fugue add an element of discovery and revelation to the poems, modulating and rendering strange these musings on what is ostensibly human.

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