Tell
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Co-winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, Tell is an exuberant, intensely fluid, and probing examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own and of other people’s lives
A novel of intense, flickering intelligence, Tell is structured as a series of interviews with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared, and may or may not have committed suicide. What might be a gloomy subject is instead alluring, lit from within by a lively deep knowledge of human nature: Buckley's eye for motivations brings to mind a Thomas Hardy for our atomized 21st-century. A thrilling novel of strange, intoxicating immediacy, Tell carries the pleasures of exciting new gossip enjoyed with a rare old cognac by a crackling fire.
Calling his work “captivating,” John Banville has asked: “Why isn’t Jonathan Buckley better known?”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This mesmerizing page-turner from Buckley (Live; Live; Live) takes the form of a transcribed interview with a woman employed as a gardener for a fabulously wealthy self-made Englishman who might be dead. The form, which has the feel of a talking head interview for a documentary but isn't explicitly framed, creates instant suspense, and the dramatic opening—"Shall we start with the crash? Seems an obvious place," says the unnamed interview subject—draws readers quickly into the story of her employer, Curtis, the founder of a high-end retail chain. Key elements of that life story include a difficult upbringing in various foster homes in England's gloomy Midlands and complicated romantic entanglements (be it his sincere attachment to his late wife who died young or his long-running affair with a Swiss art buyer whose pretensions the gardener hilariously satirizes). The gardener also lays bare the wastrel tendencies of Curtis's children in anecdotes about their drug abuse and bitcoin investments. As Buckley gradually winds toward the details of the aforementioned crash, which took place while Curtis was in Cambodia on business, he asks readers to think about how and why stories are told. This self-reflexivity results in a thought-provoking, artfully constructed narrative enriched by the mysteries that expand and proliferate throughout. It's a deliciously fraught tour de force.
