A01=Adrian Duncan
Author_Adrian Duncan
Berlin
Category=FB
Category=FBA
Cold War
Colm Toibin
communism
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
European fiction
Ireland
Irish
Irish fiction
Irish writer
John McGahern
Lightning Fields
Mathematics
Russia
Russian fiction
Sebald
Soviet Union
Stalin
Product details
- ISBN 9781788169738
- Weight: 170g
- Dimensions: 128 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 2023
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology ...'
It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'.
Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again
Adrian Duncan is an Irish artist and writer who originally trained as a structural engineer. His novels are Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019) and A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020), and he published a story collection Midfield Dynamo in 2021. Duncan was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2021, longlisted for the 2021 Edge Hill Prize and won the John McGahern Book Prize in 2020.
