SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2017 ONE OF THE TELEGRAPH'S BEST BOOKS OF 2017 ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE MONTH LRB BOOK OF THE WEEK CAUGHT BY THE RIVER BOOK OF THE MONTH 'Beautifully believable and appallingly sad ... One of the most acute, affecting and aphoristic novels of recent years ... A hallucinatory and haunting vision.' (The Guardian) This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock. It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends. Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos, and tender poignancy.

This Is Memorial Device

David Keenan

Faber&Faber

BRAND NEW, Exactly same ISBN as listed, Please double check ISBN carefully before ordering.

Literature & Fiction

Literary

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE Sammy and his three friends live in the Ardoyne, an impoverished, predominantly Catholic area of North Belfast that has become the epicentre of a country intent on cannibalising itself. They love sharp clothes, a good drink, and the songs of Perry Como - whose commitment to clean living holds up a dissonant mirror to their own attempts to rise above their circumstances. They dream of a Free State, and their methods for achieving this are uncompromising, even as they fully indulge in the spoils of war. Keen to make a difference, the boys find themselves in the incongruous position of running a comic-book shop taken over by the IRA. Their clandestine activities belong in the x-rated pages of graphic fiction: burglary, blackmail, extortion, torture, and murder - and they become transfixed by the initiatory possibilities of free-reign criminality. But when punk rock arrives and the hard edge of the decade starts to reveal its true paranoid colours, Sammy finds himself increasingly isolated, especially after bizarre and gruesome away days in Glasgow and London. Camaraderie and loyalty is the fuel of a terrorist cell. When those virtues prove faulty, the game is up - and Sammy's world starts to shrink as he is assaulted by terrifying visions. For the Good Times shouts and sings with visionary depth and power. It is not just a book about the IRA, but an exploration of what it means to 'go rogue', of the heartbreak and devastation that commitment to 'the cause' can engender, of ideas of martyrdom, fatherhood, and self-sacrifice. It unpacks any dewy-eyed romance associated with the Troubles while re-visioning it as a time of psychological and spiritual intensity where the nature of day-to-day reality itself was up for grabs. And through a dizzying amalgam of modernist prose, roughhouse vernacular and hallucinatory Irish humour, it establishes David Keenan as one of our most fearless literary stylists.

For The Good Times

Monument Maker

'In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imagination' LENNY KAYE'Visionary and prismatic, gloriously hallucinatory although grounded in the material, Monument Maker's grand sweep takes in distant historical subterrains, a shimmering summer of the present, the transient, the eternal, the profane, the divine' WENDY ERSKINE'I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream' EDNA O'BRIEN'A masterpiece' WILLIAM BASINSKIIs it possible for books to dream For books to dream within books Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe

White Rabbit Books

To Run Wild In It is a book about tarot, an experimental novella, a 'channelled' text and an extension of ideas first broached in David Keenan's acclaimed debut novel, This Is Memorial Device. Taking the maxim that the best way to understand the tarot is to create your own, Keenan has reimagined the deck as the unfolding of parallel stories alive with uncanny oracular detail. In collaboration with the artist Sophy Hollington, the pair have also created an accompanying deck that, while still having an umbilical to the card's archaic roots, future-visions it as a glam-punk portal deep into the Now.

To Run Wild In It: A Handbook of Autonomic Tarot - David Keenan & Sophie Hollington (RT#7)

Religion & Spirituality

Sophie Hollington

New Age & Spirituality

Rough Trade Books

Book 9783955931353

Wolke Verlag

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by David Keenan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by David Keenan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by David Keenan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

This Is Memorial Device

This Is Memorial Device

For The Good Times

Monument Maker

To Run Wild In It: A Handbook of Autonomic Tarot - David Keenan & Sophie Hollington (RT#7)

Book 9783955931353