Curious Earth
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€19.99
By the author of Booker-shortlisted I'll Go To Bed At Noon.
Aldous Jones is in a bad way: his dilapidated house is empty of family but full of hoarded odds and ends that remind him of his dead wife and son. A preference for whisky over washing rapidly leads to his hospitalisation but it also reawakens his desire for sex and adventure and his lifelong passion for art.
What follows is a heartbreakingly funny quest that will lead him first to the National Gallery, where he is bewitched by a Rembrandt painting, and then to Ostend, to stay with his boemian son and a ridiculous Dutch sexologist and then through a series of somewhat misguided relationships with sympathetic women to an ending of devatating poignancy...
Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961. After studying painting and anthropology, he published three prize-winning collections of poetry and then turned to novel writing with an ambitious trilogy of novels based on the lives of his parents. The first, August, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, the second, I'll Go To Bed At Noon was on the shortlist of the 2004 Man Booker Prize and the third, A Curious Earth, was met with critical acclaim. Since then he has published another collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians (shortlisted for the 2005 T.S. Eliot Prize) and begun teaching Creative Writing at Bath Spa University in Bath, where he now lives.