Quilt Paperback – 26 Aug 2010

Review

'I read Quilt with admiration - it's a work of remarkable imaginative energy.' --FRANK KERMODE

'A book of mythological power. Quilt is unforgettable, like all those great pieces of fiction that are fed by our immemorial root system, the human dream of metamorphosis.' --HELENE CIXOUS

An intense study of grief and mental disintegration, a lexical celebration and a psychological conundrum... Royle explores loss and alienation perceptively and inventively. --Guardian

Royle's baroque, athletic prose... confers a strong sense of the "strangeness" of English, "which, after all, belongs to no one" and should be continually reinvented. Royle is adept at doing just this... His meandering prose - which seems at once anarchic and meticulously arranged - is appropriate to the subject matter: the disarray and isolation a man experiences when his father dies. There are moments of delightfully eccentric humour and impressive linguistic experimentalism. --Observer

Nicholas Royle's first novel is a story of loss and love. He captures the absolute dislocating strangeness of bereavement. While the novel is bursting with inventive wordplay, Royle's use of language is most agile and beautiful in his descriptions of rays. In terms of narrative, the shifts in point of view have a sort of fairground quality to them, suddenly lurching, demanding your compliance, but it is the way the storyline ultimately develops that takes the breath away. --New Statesman

An experimental and studied look at mourning, as a man struggles to come to terms with the death of his father - clearing out his house, embarking on a strange project to house stingrays and gradually losing his grip on reality. Playful, clever and perceptive. --The Big Issue

In the Afterword, Royle says he expects the novelist 'to aspire to a writing that figures and insists on strangeness'. He certainly achieves this with Quilt... It is in those commonplace moments at the end of a life - the manhandling of an elderly parent; the solicitous, faintly patronizing conversations; the struggle with an overgrown garden and accumulated junk mail - moments which Nicholas Royle describes with such piercing accuracy, when this novel is truly at its strangest. --Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Nicholas Royle is a Professor of English at the University of Sussex and lives in Seaford. He has written numerous books on literature and critical theory, including Telepathy and Literature, The Uncanny, E.M. Forster and the influential textbook, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (with Andrew Bennett). Quilt is his first novel.