Communion Town

Author(s): Sam Thompson

Fiction.

The Man Booker longlisted novel is a meditation on how each of us conjures up our own city. Every city is made of stories: stories that meet and diverge, stories of the commonplace and the strange, of love and crime, of ghosts and monsters. The iridescent, Man Booker longlisted Communion Town is reminiscent of David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, it is the story of a place that never looks the same way twice: a place imagined anew by each citizen who walks through the changing streets among voices half-heard, signs half-glimpsed and desires half-acknowledged. This is the story of a city.


Product Information

'Dreamlike, gnarly and present, Communion Town shifts like a city walker, from street to street.' China Mieville 'Communion Town is one of those rare creatures -- a first novel that combines ambition with humanity. It is a strange, remarkable work.' Tash Aw 'Sam Thompson's city is made of stories, curling recursively around a sense of loss, a haunting, a mysterious gap in his characters' sense of themselves. Dissociated and puzzled, they find themselves nevertheless - & often each other too. Thompson's other talent is to be able to construct our world out of what appears to be a repeating nightmare and, against the odds, find something good in it. Communion Town sucks the reader in. It is a disconcerting but compelling location for genuinely human truths.' M. John Harrison

Sam Thompson was born in 1978. He teaches English at St Anne's College, Oxford, and he writes for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and the Guardian. He lives in Oxford with his wife and son.

General Fields

  • : 9780007454761
  • : HarperCollins Publishers
  • : Fourth Estate Ltd
  • : May 2012
  • : United Kingdom
  • : August 2012
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Sam Thompson
  • : Hardback
  • : 823.92
  • : 304