PrintToday by David Miller
'David Miller's quiet, subtle novel is not merely a story about Conrad and a tribute to Conrad. It is a Conradian achievement in itself. A wonderful piece of fiction. Moving and revelatory.'
A N Wilson
'The death of the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad is the central event of David Miller’s debut novel. A reimagining of Conrad’s final days, Today explores the nature of bereavement.'
Matthew Dennison
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A profoundly moving debut novel about the fragility of family love, the resilience of the living, the durability of memory and the experience of bereavement.
August 1924. John Conrad arrives at his parents’ home on the outskirts of Canterbury, where family and friends are assembling for the bank holiday weekend. His crippled mother has been discharged from a nursing home, his brother drives down from London with wife and child. But as the guests converge, John’s father dies.
Today follows the numb implications of sudden death: the surprise, the shock, the deep fissures in a family exposed through grief. But there is also laughter, fraud and theft; the continuation of life, all viewed through the eyes of Lilian Hallowes – John’s father’s secretary – never quite at the centre of things but always observing, the still point in a turning world.
Today is a remarkable debut, an investigation of bereavement, family and Englishness, beautiful in its understatement and profound in its psychological acuity.
David Miller lives in West London with his wife, the writer Kate Colquhoun, and their two sons. He was born in Edinburgh in 1966 and educated in Canterbury and at Cambridge. He is a director of the literary agency Rogers, Coleridge & White, Ltd. Today is his first novel.
Reviews
Leo Robson, New Statesman
Matthew Dennison, Spectator
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Hardcover: 176 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Books
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