Bücher von Justin Gardiner

A book that bends time and fragments narrative. On the surface, Small Altars appears to narrate the story of two brothers, offering a singular portrayal of grief, loss, and the quiet violence inherent in adolescence. Gardiner considers the powerlessness of his narrator as he comes of age against a backdrop of comic books, piano lessons, and family secrets. At the same time, Small Altars explores--through form, style, and technique--precisely how memory works. By eschewing the impulse to rely strictly on chronology as a structural device, Gardiner instead creates a provocative fragmentation of time, meaning, and narrative. He interrogates our use of story to lend unity and cohesion to what are essentially discontinuous experiences, to find meaning in loss, grief, and their indelible aftermath.

In February 2010, with the help of a friend, Justin Gardiner boarded a ship bound for Antarctica. A stowaway of sorts, Gardiner used his experiences as the narrative backdrop for this compelling firsthand account that breathes new life into the nineteenth-century journals of Antarctic explorers such as Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton.