Featherstone: an attractive, small rural town serving outlying estates, bank, post office, school...At first glance, Kirsty Gunn's small country town is like any other - a closely connected community bound by habit and familiarity. Yet as we're invited to spend the weekend in Featherstone we come to realise there's something more to this place that unsettles us, something intense and intimate that goes deep into the lives of the people who live here and bares open their hearts...Featherstone is a novel about memory and need, forgetting and faith, a story of people - of their hopes and faiths and disappointments, of desire and the way desire can go rotten inside - but above all it offers an insight to the ways in which all of us deceive and believe in one another, in how we love.

The Love Bomb: And Other Musical Pieces, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the Fall of Jerusalem

Gunn, Kirsty

Faber&Faber

Kirsty Gunn’s first novel, Rain, was praised by the New York Times as exquisitely written . . . every page expresses familiar feelings in ways that are unsentimental and entirely original”; spellbinding,” raved the Boston Globe. That same resonant magnetism and emotional depth infuse her new novel. Featherstone is the story of the mysterious disappearance from an isolated town in Scotland of a young woman whose absence still reverberates in the lives of everyone whose life she touched. When Sonny Johanssen looks up from his flower bed, he is sure that he has just seen the impossible. And yet he feels her: his niece, Francie, has come home. He’s not the only one who senses her presence. Across town, Ray Weldon, Francie’s long-suffering high school sweetheart, is anxiously scouring their old haunts, convinced that she has finally returned. But has she really come home, or is her presence some kind of resurrection in the minds of those who love her? It soon becomes clear that Featherstone is not a traditional tale of small-town life, but that the enigmatic Francie is a catalyst for a different, deeper story. Her homecoming disturbs the inhabitants of this community, unraveling a sense of security and stability and turning inward people’s hopes and dreams  with dangerous but ultimately regenerative consequences.

Featherstone

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

The hills only come back the same: I don't mind . . .' begins Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music, a novel that takes us to a new understanding of how fiction can affect us. Presented as a collection of found papers, appendices and notes, The Big Music tells the story of John Sutherland of 'The Grey House', who is dying and creating in the last days of his life a musical composition that will define it. Yet he has little idea of how his tune will echo or play out into the world - and as the book moves inevitably through its themes of death and birth, change and stasis, the sound of his solitary story comes to merge and connect with those around him. In this work of fiction, Kirsty Gunn has created something as real as music or as a dream. Not so much a novel as a place the reader comes to inhabit and to know, The Big Music is a literary work of undeniable originality and power.

Big Music, The

Literary

This new collection of stories offers a candid peek at infidelity in all its guises. These are tales of lust, deceit, resentment and regret - and of the secrets and lies that can chip away at human relationships. In a series of interwoven dramas, we find mothers yearning for adventure, for the exhilaration of the open road or the anonymity of the forest; fathers absent in body or mind; husbands who look the other way; complacency turned to spite and apathy turned to betrayal. At the same time Gunn pursues the glorious rush of a snap decision, the liberty of answering that siren call of a better life elsewhere. Written with Gunn's trademark attention to nuances of behaviour, motive and even landscape, Infidelity is a temptingly beautiful work that asks 'What if?' and dares to find out.

Infidelities

A gin-fueled love story with one part One Day mixed with one part Zadie Smith and a splash of Ali Smith. Included in the Guardian's "Top Ten books about unrequited love" "Alright" I said, "I’ll try..." This is how Emily Stuart opens her intricate tale of a classic love affair that becomes Caroline’s Bikini: a swirling cocktail of infatuation, obsession, and imagination. The moment that Emily’s friend Evan Gordonstone - a successful middle-aged financier - meets Caroline Beresford – a glamorous former horsewoman, and now housewife, hostess, and landlady - there is a "PING!" At least, that's how Evan describes it to Emily when he persuades her to record his story: the story of falling into unrequited love, which is as old as Western literature itself. Thus begins a hypnotic series of conversations set against the beguiling backdrop of West London’s bars, fueled in intensity by endless gin and tonics and Q&amp;As. From the depths of mid-winter to July’s hot swelter, Emily's narration of Evan’s passion for Caroline will take him to the brink of his own destruction. Written in a voice so playful, so charismatic, and so thoughtfully aware of the responsibilities of fiction it can only be by Kirsty Gunn, Caroline’s Bikini is a swooning portrait of courtly love - in a modern world not celebrated for its restraint and abstraction. Ready. Steady. Go!

Caroline's Bikini: A Novel

Caroline's Bikini

The mysterious disappearance and absence of a young woman from an isolated Scottish town have a profound impact on the lives of everyone she touched, but her possible homecoming could provide a catalyst for even more unsettling changes in their lives. By the author of Rain.

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

Kirsty Gunn's spellbinding third novel is a portrait of the small town of Featherstone and the interior lives of its inhabitants. Over the course of one weekend, years after the beautiful and spirited Francie Johanssen fled town, rumors of her return stir memories that threaten to disrupt the community. Gunn reveals how Francie's absence continues to shape the subconscious longings, hopes, and dreams of those she left behind, including Margaret, the local hotel's promiscuous bartender; Mary Susan, a troubled and rebellious teenager who wants to get out of town as soon as she can; Francie's elderly uncle Sonny; Harland, the faithless minister; and Kate, his despondent wife. Affected most of all, perhaps, is Ray, Francie's old high school boyfriend who has never been able to let go of her. As tension mounts in Featherstone, Gunn elegantly crafts a story that is "richly layered and rewarding" (Scotland on Sunday).

Featherstone: A Novel

United States

Harper-perennial

Rain

As their family decays under the influence of alcohol, twelve-year-old Janey and her brother spend their summers by a lake, where they defend each other against the encroachments of the adult world. A first novel. 20,000 first printing. $30,000 ad/promo.

GROVE PRESS

In hypnotic and mesmerizing language, Kirsty Gunn explores the dark world of a young girl who has grown up with a mother dependent on storytelling and the oblivion of addiction to cope with the memory of lost love, the girl's father. Raised on deceptive tales of happiness, the younger woman is drawn into and begins to relive the real story of pain, abandonment, and the tyranny of desire. As her life spirals out of control, the tangled yarn of her mother's past begins to unravel, until finally she can come to tell a story that is her own. This luminous and disturbing novel reveals the terrible intimacy of family love and the redemptive power of storytelling.

The Keepsake

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

Books by Gunn, Kirsty

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

The Love Bomb: And Other Musical Pieces, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the Fall of Jerusalem

Featherstone

Big Music, The

Infidelities

Caroline's Bikini: A Novel

Caroline's Bikini

Featherstone

Featherstone: A Novel

Rain

The Keepsake