Patrick McGuinness

Based on the story of Christopher Jefferies, hounded by the press for a crime he didn’t commit, this is an elegiac exploration of trauma.

The poet Patrick McGuinness has always been interested in the hidden folds of our inner lives, the seams connecting present and past. As he admits in Other People’s Countries, his ingeniously fractured 2014 memoir about the sleepy Belgian town where he spent part of his childhood, “like a character in a Beckett play, I’ve always found the hardest words of all to be here and now”. In that book he described how his dressmaker grandmother would sew his school uniform, as ever paying particular attention to the lining or “doublure” (“the wearer might project the outer garment, but really their relationship was with the doublure”). Off he went to English public school, in a uniform that was secretly unique... 

Patrick McGuinness’s “Throw Me to the Wolves” begins with the discovery of the body of a murdered woman named Zalie Dyer, found among the weeds and trash on the outskirts of a city in present-day southeast England. Among the first on the scene are the novel’s narrator, a detective nicknamed Prof, and his partner, Gary. This somewhat ill-matched pair will conduct the investigation of Zalie’s death. Almost at once they have a suspect in custody: Wolphram, a retired schoolteacher. A public rush to judgment occurs. Wolphram is a loner who reads poetry and listens to opera box sets on his expensive music system. “It’s all set up,” Prof remarks. “Mr. Wolphram is going to be the nation’s High-Culture Hermit-Ogre.”...

Throw Me to the Wolves, by Patrick McGuinness: a moving fictional take on the hounding of Christopher Jefferies.

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Patrick McGuinness uses Jefferies' terrible experiences as the basis for his thoughtful, sometimes provocative, fictional exploration, Throw Me to the Wolves. He shifts the action to an invented estuary town in the south-east of England and his imagined version of Jefferies is Michael Wolphram, a former teacher at Chapelton College.

McGuinness's story dwells on a couple of areas. One is the lives of the detectives investigating the killing; the other, the troubled world of British boarding schools during the 80s. They merge with the narrator, Alexander, who was a student at Chapelton before joining the police...

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This stylish novel is part classic police procedural, part literary fiction, says Melissa Katsoulis...

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Kent has been the setting for some decidedly unsettling fiction in recent years. David Mitchell and Nicola Barker have found an eerie darkness in the Garden of England, reimagining it as a metaphysical crossing place, a hiding place and a hinterland between city and country, land and water. Or as Patrick McGuinness puts it in his new novel, the way an estuary such as the Medway evokes “on the one hand, drains; on the other, the open sea”.

There are ghosts everywhere you look in Patrick McGuinness’s new novel: the ghosts haunting former public schoolboy Ander Widdowson and those haunting an entire nation.

A young woman named Zalie Dyer is found dead, her body wrapped in bin bags and left in a secluded spot in Kent. Sixty-eight-year-old retired teacher Michael Wolphram has been arrested in connection with her murder and is being interviewed by two police officers. One of them is Ander, who was taught by Wolphram at the local boarding school, Chapelton College, 30 years earlier.

There are ghosts everywhere you look in Patrick McGuinness’s new novel: the ghosts haunting former public schoolboy Ander Widdowson and those haunting an entire nation.

A young woman named Zalie Dyer is found dead, her body wrapped in bin bags and left in a secluded spot in Kent. Sixty-eight-year-old retired teacher Michael Wolphram has been arrested in connection with her murder and is being interviewed by two police officers. One of them is Ander, who was taught by Wolphram at the local boarding school, Chapelton College, 30 years earlier.

Throw Me to the Wolves by Patrick McGuinness 

Throw Me to the Wolves by Patrick McGuinness — absorbing police procedural...