08/17/2015
In Thomson’s (Secrecy) wonderfully written novel, London native Katherine “Kit” Carlyle is a headstrong, fanciful, and flighty 19-year-old living in Rome. Her father, David, is a roving CNN journalist who was largely an absent parent, and her mother, Stephanie, died of cancer six years previously. Having landed a scholarship to study at Oxford University, Kit obsesses over the fact that she is an IVF baby: she was stored for eight years as an embryo before she was implanted in Stephanie. Kit feels as if David blames her for causing Stephanie’s cancer by the IVF procedure, so Kit decides to run away and come to terms with her own identity. Kit travels to Berlin to stay with the orthodontist Klaus Frings, demonstrating her uncanny knack for meeting a series of helpful, generous strangers. All the while, she enjoys fantasizing about the scenes of her frantic, desperate father searching for her, and she even arranges rendezvous with him, which she doesn’t attend. She calls herself Misty and leaves Berlin to stay in Moscow, adding another layer of deception to her vanishing act. Thomson’s seamless prose style and striking minor characters round out this satisfying, offbeat narrative. (Oct.)
**Named a PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ‘Big Indie Book of Fall 2015’**
"Elegant...[with] poised and crystalline prose that piles lovely sentence atop lovely sentence...a story told with authority about a bold woman." —The New york Times Book Review
“Thomson is a hypnotic writer. His prose is precise and controlled, his images intriguingly dreamlike. Katherine Carlyle leaves a sharp, visceral afterimage in its wake; much of its staying power lies in Thomson’s ability to send the reader’s imagination beyond its final page.” —Elle
“The title character of this lean, well-paced novel is a nineteen-year-old, born via in-vitro fertilization, who is haunted by the idea that she spent eight years as a frozen embryo prior to her birth…She is a novice in the ways of the world and her increasingly reckless behavior can be tiresome, but Thomson engineers a startling climax.” —The New Yorker
“In his long career, novelist Rupert Thomson has been compared to everyone from Franz Kafka to Oliver Sacks…But this one is different. The inspiration for "Katherine Carlyle" comes from a deeply personal place for Thomson: the conception of his daughter…Thomson brings Katherine authenticity and empathy on her wild journey north.” —Minnesota Public Radio's "All Things Considered"
“[In Katherine Carlyle] Thomson’s delivery is swift on the page: fluid, visual, deft as a thriller writer’s. …The result is charismatic: you’re gripped exactly as you would be by a movie. You’re racing along on the shoulder of the motorcyclist, you’re listening to the music spill out of the club, you’re watching the cigarette butt arc down from the terrace to the cobbles in a shower of sparks. At the same time, something about the way Thomson paces the action, his phrasing and timing, his management of scale and grain – how close you are to events, how far away, how metaphorical they might be at one time, how literal at another – lets you know that in Katherine Carlyle you’re getting something more than a thriller…[It’s] shocking, emotionally draining and satisfying all at once." —The Guardian
“Rupert Thomson’s haunting family tale…[is] a contemporary masterpiece.” —Robert McCrum, The Guardian
“The only certainty about a new Rupert Thomson novel – besides the clear, elegant prose – is that it will defy the expectations of his readers…It is a bold choice for Thomson, a man who’s just turned 60, to write so intimately in the voice of a 19-year-old woman, but Katherine is a wholly compelling character, one who remains curiously elusive despite her apparent candour…Thomson has created a novel that resists easy categories, but remains with the reader long after the last page, asking profound questions about the way we choose to live and connect with others.” —The Observer
“What links each of Thomson’s books are bouts of supreme strangeness and profound disquiet, and the author’s relentlessly cool, controlled, immaculate prose… Thomson charges [Katherine Carlyle] with such high-powered emotional intensity that it is impossible to put down… This is a stunning, thought-provoking novel; we should read it and then read everything else by this very fine writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
"From Rome to Berlin to the frozen wastes of northern Russia, Katherine meets kind and cruel strangers, relies on her wits and overcomes considerable odds. This hauntingly beautiful and deeply immersive novel has the reader rooting for its main character every step of the way." —Minneapolis Star Tribune, **Holiday Books Guide Selection**
“Katherine Carlyle— spare, clean, almost sterile and yet still compulsively readable — is startling and refreshing in its originality, framing a young woman’s search for identity in the wake of tragedy in a compelling and unusual way…Still, after [Thomson] draws us skillfully into Katherine’s mysterious quest, he renders us unable to look away.” —Miami Herald
“In some ways a coming-of-age story, and in others an origin story (not just of Carlyle, but of all of us), this lovely, haunting novel left us thinking for a long time about where we came from, what it means, and how it made us who we are.” —The L Magazine
“‘Katherine Carlyle’ is mesmerizing — in all senses of the word… Thomson’s prose is gracefully crafted; it’s a transfixing, intriguing adventure.” —New York Daily News
“In Thomson’s latest novel, a young woman conceived through IVF has an identity crisis, and her misguided fantasies take her on a mysterious journey to the end of the world. Jonathan Lethem calls Thomson “so undervalued, such a pure novelist.” —Publishers Weekly
“Ostensibly a journey in search of solitude, Kit’s increasingly reckless path lays bare the truth about her flight, that the act of running away may actually be a plea for being found. Thomson’s simply stated prose is made richer by the flaws of Kit’s character, resulting in an honest and worthy storyof self-discovery.” —Booklist
“Katherine's quest is an understandable reaction to a digital world that's both intrusive and disconnected.” —Kirkus Reviews
“This is a novel with panache.” —Library Journal
“Rupert Thomson has over the past three decades produced a wildly heterogeneous troupe of narrators to inhabit the titillating, sometimes gothic dreamworlds of his fiction… In Katherine Carlyle Thomson creates a remarkably true-feeling modern teenage girl, an accomplishment in itself, then goes one step further in having her strike an incongruously detached, mature tone … Thomson captures the magnetism between strangers, the erosion of mores and the amplification of chance that one finds when travelling alone – more so, presumably, when one is also a precocious, good-looking girl.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Katherine’s willingness to follow whatever leads her environment throws at her…has just such an air of surreal reverie, propelled forward by the spare, visual precision of the prose. Thomson’s willingness to pursue this kind of existential narrative…makes him feel a refreshingly unEnglish writer… [B]eneath the drifting surface of Katherine’s journey, through concrete Berlin underpasses and bleak northern hotel rooms, there emerges a tight and compelling narrative. It is a striking literary performance, memorably combining dream and thriller.” —The Sunday Times
“Katherine Carlyle is an IVF thriller about the relationships between parents and their children, set across Rome, Berlin and Russia. Pimps, prostitutes, discarded identities, late-night rendezvous — all of them feature in this book. It sounds like madness but in the hands of Rupert Thomson, it reads like a dream…Thomson has a knack of writing intriguing novels with strange dilemmas…[and] this novel should give him the recognition he much deserves.” —The Times
“As moodily charged as an impending weather system, and suffused with the same indistinct sense of threat, this is a sometimes dark but ultimately redemptive tale, whose dreamlike motifs, coincidences and chance encounters are of a piece with the feeling of unreality besetting its damaged heroine…Unfolding in the acclaimed Thomson’s characteristically lucid and sensuous prose, this entirely unsentimental novel is as absorbing as it is affecting.” —The Daily Mail
“Rupert Thomson’s gift for description is impressive, and this is an effective study of madness infused with travelogue.” —Mail on Sunday
“Katherine’s story, a profound, unnerving meditation on love and existence, is the canvas to which Thomson applies colour and beauty…[B]rilliant.” —The Independent
“Thomson is an original storyteller who with each new novel offers his readers something bracingly or daringly different…What binds them all – Katherine Carlyle included – is Thomson’s precise and deceptively simple prose, together with his ability to jolt, unsettle and move the reader with gothic drama, strange antics and moments of carefully calibrated tension…. [Katherine Carlyle] is a triumph...[and] has all the mystery and impetus of a good spy novel.” —The National
“Although the theme of personal discovery is a common one, never before has it been tackled from the unique perspective offered in Rupert Thomson’s beautifully written novel, Katherine Carlyle…Highly original, somber and breathtakingly cinematic…Thomson has truly outdone himself with this fascinating work.” —Bookreporter
“[A] sprawling, emotionally rich work.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“A strange story –in a good way– with gorgeous writing and an intriguing story-line.” —Entertainment Realm
“[B]reathtaking and utterly original.” —Read It Forward
“[A] profound and moving novel.” —Booktrib
“Thomson’s novels tend to be dark and are often concerned with people trying to escape. This one is no exception…an interesting read.” —The Modern Novel
“Rupert Thomson is so undervalued, such a pure novelist. He explores what interests him in the way that I most admire. He’s not trying to demonstrate its relevancy or extend his own argument. Instead, each novel is etched into reality by his curiosity.” —Jonathan Lethem, Hopes&Fears
“Katherine Carlyle left me stunned and amazed. Thomson’s ability to create a world that feels entirely original and untouched by any other mind is at full strength in this strange and haunting book. The story proceeds with perfect logic from mystery to mystery, and takes the reader with it, unable to stop reading or guess where it will go next. The title character is utterly convincing, and her quest expresses with great clarity and power the strangeness of her origins. It’s a masterpiece.” —Philip Pullman, author of the best-selling His Dark Materials trilogy
“Written with the pace, verve, and detail of a spy novel, sleek and oddly honest, this is the fascinating story of Katherine Carlyle who mysteriously decides that instead of university and a privileged life she will erase her identity and much of her emotions and go untraceably to the most remote settlement of the Russian north. She is not seeking love. She is determined to have abandoned it.” —James Salter, author of All That Is
“Smart, stylish, inventive, and always entertaining, Rupert Thomson displays enormous range as a novelist. His prose is consistently sharp, his ideas consistently intriguing. I would read anything that Rupert Thomson wrote.” —Lionel Shriver, best-selling author of Big Brother and We Need to Talk About Kevin
“Rupert Thomson’s twilight worlds have long enchanted many readers, and this road trip through a snow dome of mesmeric hallucinations is Thomson at his best.” —Richard Flanagan, author of the Man Booker Prize–winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North
“If the mind best comprehends the heart through metaphor, what new ways of imagining ourselves and our loves are offered by technologies earlier undreamt of? This is the question Rupert Thomson seeks to answer in this stealthy, intelligent, surreptitiously affective novel. With a narrative that moves from the sophisticated milieux of Rome and Berlin to the startling lower reaches of the Arctic Circle, delivered in prose that is spare, cinematic and masterfully controlled, Katherine Carlyle is at once seductively contemporary and suggestively fable-like: Frozen for grown-ups.” —Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch
“This riveting and visionary story haunted me long after I finished the last page. Katherine Carlyle is an extraordinary novel.” —Deborah Moggach, best-selling author of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
“The language is beautiful… [I]t is difficult not to fall under the spell of Katherine Carlyle and the book that shares her name.” —Roughshots
2015-07-15
A young woman sets out to find the isolation she craves in Thomson's (Secrecy, 2014, etc.) picaresque novel. The 19-year-old title character retains vague memories of being an IVF embryo. Her mother's death and the perpetual absence of her father, a CNN reporter, contribute to a life in which being solitary is the natural state. To bring her physical circumstance into concert with her psychic state, Katherine, a few weeks before she's due to enter Oxford, cleans out her bank accounts and, without telling anyone, takes off for stark and increasingly bleak surroundings culminating in a remote island in northern Russia. Unlike the hero of her favorite film, Antonioni's The Passenger, Katherine wants less to start over than to exist in a state of anonymity. For Thomson, Katherine's quest is an understandable reaction to a digital world that's both intrusive and disconnected. But though her voice achieves a consistent tone of blank angst, Katherine feels more a construct than a character. Worse, the intrusive passages in which she imagines her father's attempts to find her threaten to make her flight seem an adolescent stunt. The finish, in which Thomson brings together all the book's strands, is a technical feat and, because of the cruelty to which he subjects Katherine and the triteness of the denouement, both homiletic and sadistic. A book that promises insight into the emotional detachment of our current technological overload should deliver more than the resolution of daddy issues.
