Bücher von Ceridwen Dovey

Rarely does a debut novel attract the sweeping critical acclaim of Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin. Shortlisted for two prestigious awards, this tale centers around a military coup in an unnamed country, with characters who have no names or any identifying physical characteristics. Known simply as the ex-President's chef, barber, and portrait painter, these three men perform their mundane tasks and appear unaware of the atrocities of their employer's regime. But when the President is deposed, the trio are revealed as less than innocent. A deeply chilling yet sensual novel, Blood Kin illustrates Lord Acton's famous quip, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely," and marks the beginning of an illustrious literary career.

Profoundly addictive and unsettling, Ceridwen Dovey's In the Garden of the Fugitives is a masterful novel of duplicity and counterplay, as brilliantly illuminating as it is surprising-about the obscure workings of guilt in the human psyche, the compulsion to create and control, and the dangerous morphing of desire into obsession. Almost twenty years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives a letter from a man who has long stalked her from a distance. Once, Royce was her benefactor and she was one of his brightest protégées. Now Royce is ailing and Vita's career as a filmmaker has stalled, and both have reasons for wanting to settle accounts. They enter into an intimate game of words, played according to shifting rules of engagement.Beyond their murky shared history, they are both aware they can use each other to free themselves from deeper pasts. Vita is processing the shameful inheritance of her birthplace, and making sense of the disappearance of her beloved. Royce is haunted by memories of the untimely death of his first love, an archaeologist who worked in the Garden of the Fugitives in Pompeii. Between what's been repressed and what has been disguised are disturbances that reach back through decades, even centuries. But not everything from the past is precious: each gorgeous age is built around a core of rottenness.