Books by Keith Ridgway
The Parts
Set in present-day Dublin, The Parts interweaves six lives and six narratives. In her mansion in the mountains, millionaire widow Delly Roche is getting ready for death. Keeping her company are her companion of many years, Kitty Flood, and the discreetly insane Dr. George Addison-Blake.
So why is Delly so keen to die? What exactly is in the letter discovered by Kitty? What is Dr. George doing in the shed by the tennis courts? And does any of it have anything to do with the conspiracy theories being hinted at on Joe Kavanaugh's radio show? Down in the city, Barry, Joe's producer, is getting caught up in something and he's not quite sure why. And all the time, conducting business down by the river, doing his best to keep out of this, is Kez.
Something is about to occur.
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A Shock
Ever since Keith Ridgway published his landmark cult novel Hawthorn & Child, his ardent fans have yearned for more Finally, Ridgway gives us A Shock, his thrilling and unsparing, slippery and shockingly good new novel.
Formed as a rondel of interlocking stories with a clutch of more or less loosely connected repeating characters, it’s at once deracinated yet potent with place, druggy yet frighteningly shot through with reality. His people appear, disappear, and reappear. They’re on the fringes of London, clinging to sanity or solvency or a story by their fingernails, consumed by emotions and anxieties in fuzzily understood situations. A deft, high-wire act, full of imprecise yet sharp dialog as well as witchy sleights of hand reminiscent of Muriel Spark, A Shock delivers a knockout punch of an ending.
Perhaps Ridgway’s most breathtaking quality is his scintillating stealthiness: you can never quite put your finger on how he casts his spell―he delivers the shock of a master jewel thief (already far-off and scot-free) stealing your watch: when at some point you look down at your wrist, all you see is that in more than one way you don’t know what time it is…
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Hawthorn & Child (Ndp)
A mind-blowing adventure into a literary fourth dimension: part noir, part London snapshot, all unsettlingly amazing Hawthorn and his partner, Child, are called to the scene of a mysterious shooting in North London. The only witness is unreliable, the clues are scarce, and the victim, a young man who lives nearby, swears he was shot by a ghost car. While Hawthorn battles with fatigue and strange dreams, the crime and the narrative slip from his grasp and the stories of other Londoners take over: a young pickpocket on the run from his boss; an editor in possession of a disturbing manuscript; a teenage girl who spends her days at the Tate Modern; a pack of wolves; and a madman who has been infected by the former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Haunting these disparate lives is the shadowy figure of Mishazzo, an elusive crime magnate who may be running the city, or may not exist at all.
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Never Love a Gambler (New Directions Pearls)
Marvelous stories by the Irish writer acclaimed by Zadie Smith as “idiosyncratic and fascinating” Never Love a Gambler is a showcase for the exceptional talents of Keith Ridgway. The Times (London) praised his stories as “flawlessly structured yarns told in lovingly crafted prose.” Ridgway’s characters negotiate their way through love, madness, lust, anger, religious obsession, crime, and absence in stories told with innovative mastery ― brightened by fiercely vivid dialogues. Never Love a Gambler is a mental rust-remover: refreshing, bracing, and often violently funny.
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A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories
by Naomi Alderman, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Ali Smith, Yiyun Li, Elif Batuman, Keith Ridgway, Leone Ross, Joshua Cohen, Charlie Kaufman
What happens when Kafka’s idiosyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? Find out in this anthology of brand-new Kafka-inspired short stories by prizewinning, bestselling writers.
Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most enigmatic geniuses of European literature. He’s been hailed a prophet and a diagnostician, and a century after his death, his unique perspective on the anxieties, injustices, and rapidly shifting belief systems of the modern world continues to speak to our contemporary moment.
From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to an apartment search that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by a twentieth-century visionary, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.
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$17.95
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$20.95