Tell by Jonathan Buckley

Curtis Doyle, a self-made businessman and art collector, has vanished from his palatial home in the Scottish Highlands. In the wake of his disappearance, the woman who worked as his gardener is being interviewed for a possible film about her employer. A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s.

REVIEWS

Buckley’s format … yields great rewards. It allows the gardener, as she tells her boss’s life story, to jump from episode to episode and character to character without the structural impositions of a conventional plot. And her voice, for the most part, is as natural and vivid as real voices are…. And, even if that story never builds to anything greater than the sum of its anecdotes, many of those anecdotes are rather wonderful: thumbnail-sketches of characters who briefly pass through, potted histories, family myths, jokes, reflections on a life lived in proximity to greatness. Tell is one of the best new novels I’ve read in a while."― Benjamin Markovitz, Telegraph

"Given that so many of Buckley’s novels are concerned with ideas of memory, selfhood and storytelling, this is hardly new territory for him. Yet the interview conceit in Tell makes it feel fresh, the withholding of interiority requiring an unusual engagement. Don’t take the conversational prose at face value; underneath it lies a whole other set of mysteries besides Curtis’s. Pay attention and you’ll find them."― George Cochrane, Financial Times

"Always well crafted, this novel is engaging in parts and digressive in others, which adds to its realism, capturing how people chatter their way down alleys, rarely hewing to the main road of a tale…. The buildup in Tell is perpetual, a sense that an explanation must be coming. But the author diverges from expectations and converges on reality, where remembering is not the same as understanding. Abruptly, someone may just disappear, and all that remains is the sight of a figure wandering across a bridge - no splash heard, just the fading ripples of “why.”"― Tom Rachman, New York Times

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback with French flaps
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 978-1804270721
Pages: 200