Gone
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In this erotic, emotional debut novel, a young man is torn between two cities, two cultures, and two women.
Disillusioned with his marriage to the controlling Ursula, shattered by the death of his sister, and unsettled by the vandals threatening the security of his home, Stephen, a young Dubliner, moves to New York hoping to make a clean start.
He is quickly swept up in an affair with Holfy, a fiercely independent woman fifteen years his senior, but before long finds himself living a divided life, unable to break his ties to Ursula, Dublin, and the past. The obsessive, intensely erotic bond with Holfy soon begins to fray, and Stephen is forced to face himself and to unravel an identity--and a home--that no longer seems to exist.
Navigating a rocky journey through the labyrinth of death, desire, and the fickleness of truth, Martin Roper's Gone combines raw emotion and sensuality with Joycean lyricism. It confirms the arrival of an exciting new talent.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With an unflinching and at times painful honesty, Roper's debut novel incisively explores the brutality of intimate relationships. Stephen, an angry young Dublin factory worker and aspiring writer struggles with the loss of his 19-year-old sister to cancer and the disintegration of his marriage to a controlling, bitter journalist, Ursula. He and Ursula marry early, "in love with notions of each other," but their marriage begins to collapse as they renovate a house she buys. Relentlessly tormented by a sadistic gang of neighborhood kids, they are unable to offer each other solace, and when Stephen gets the chance to move to New York, he takes it. In the city, where "life moves too quickly... to let memories gather," he begins a titillating and sometimes violent affair with Holfy, an independent photographer 15 years his senior, while still corresponding with Ursula. His tortured analysis of his interaction with these two very different women drives the novel. Though it lacks a conventional plot and is sometimes frustratingly vague on practical details Stephen seems to earn a living only sporadically, and his aims as a writer are unclear the book achieves an impressive consistency of tone and purpose. Roper has a keen and unforgiving eye for the little cruelties of love, and his perspicacious psychological explorations offer startling insight into the nature of artistic creation, death, pain, pleasure, desire and hatred.
