Katherine Carlyle - Rupert Thomson

Katherine Carlyle is Rupert Thomson’s breakthrough novel. Written in the beautifully spare, lucid, and cinematic prose Thomson is known for, and powered by his natural gift for storytelling, it uses the modern techniques of IVF to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about identity, the search for personal meaning, and how we are loved.

Unmoored by her mother’s death and feeling her father to be an increasingly distant figure, Katherine Carlyle abandons the set course of her life and starts out on a mysterious journey to the ends of the world. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scène for a courageous leap to true empowerment.

PRAISE
“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

“Thomson’s simply stated prose is made richer by the flaws of Kit’s character, resulting in an honest and worthy story of self-discovery.” —Booklist

“Katherine Carlyle is an oddly compelling heroine whose eccentric disappearing act becomes a journey of self-discovery. This is a novel with panache.” —Library Journal

“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, best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy

“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 any book that 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 Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize

“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

“Written with the pace 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