A Game with Sharpened Knives - Softcover

Belton, Neil

2.97

35 ratings by Goodreads

9780297848141: A Game with Sharpened Knives

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0297848143 ISBN 13: 9780297848141

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2005

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In 1939, the life of an Austrian physicist was saved by a revolutionary whose own sentence of execution had been commuted almost twenty years earlier. The physicist was Erwin Schrodinger, charismatic winner of the Nobel prize for Physics in 1931, forced to flee when the Nazis entered Austria; the revolutionary was the Irisch Fuhrer, Eamon de Valera. These are the extraordinary facts behind this extraordinary fiction. Murder is in the air, and on the sea beyond the mouth of the river Liffey. German bombs are dropping, accidentally it is reported, on Dublin. In 1941, Ireland is a country not truly at peace, either with Germany, or with its neighbour across the Irish sea, or in fact with itself. Erwin Schrodinger, bohemian intellectual and emotional enigma, is living in cramped exile in the village of Clontarf on the outskirts of Dublin, with his wife, his lover and their child. A Game with Sharpened Knives is the story of a man foundering on his own desires, a man who often finds it easier to say nothing, for no one in the tense and impoverished city of Dublin is quite what they appear. The first language of this country, as Erwin's Irish lover tells him, is silence.From the winner of the Irish Times prize, a first work of fiction, and a truly magnificent novel.

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About the Author:

Neil Belton was born in Dublin and brought up in the suburb of Clontarf. He is an Editorial Director at Faber & Faber and the author of The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A Life Against Cruelty, which won the Irish Times prize in 1999.

Review:

'This is a text you will remember for years...austere, authoritative fiction, a fine and melancholy novel, its poignant insights shimmering...' -- Hilary Mantel London Review of Books 'Neil Belton's first novel is an improbable masterpiece...what makes this such an impressive first novel is the eloquence and energy of the prose... thoroughly to be recommended.' -- Daniel Johnson THE EVENING STANDARD 'Historical novel, tragic romance, war fiction, epic of ideas, (it) is full of such menace... worth reading and re-reading' -- Finn Fordham THE GUARDIAN 'He writes of dreariness with beautiful clarity that makes it as exhilarating as a mid-winter swim in Dublin Bay.' -- Patrick Skene Catling THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'an ambitious and atmsopheric novel.' -- Hephzibah Anderson OBSERVER 'This is a book steeped in veiled threats and intrigue...Belton's novel is hauntingly powerful.' -- James Morrison LITERARY REVIEW 'Neil Belton's book is very different and really good... Its greatest strength is in its depiction of Dublin...powerful and enthralling.' -- Allan Massie THE SCOTSMAN 'elegantly received and deftly executed' -- Stephanie Cross THE DAILY MAIL 'Written with a poet's ear for the resonance and ambiguiteis of language, A GAME WITH SHARPENED KNIVES unfolds its narrative of lives dislocated by time and change with subtlety and skill.' -- Nick Rennison WATERSTONE'S QUARTERLY 'Neil Belton's first novel, A GAME WITH SHARPENED KNIVES takes the life of the physicist Erwin Schrodinger and makes something strange and wonderful of it.' -- Ian Jack THE GUARDIAN 'dense, subtle and, perhaps surprisingly, entertaining novel of ideas...' -- John Banville IRISH TIMES

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