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Intermission

Owen Martell

$39.99

Paperback

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English
Windmill Books
15 January 2014
This fine if elusive novel about a jazz giant echoes his art in both its style and its story-telling...

A novel as oblique, elusive but quietly hypnotic as its hero's own playing. - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent

Captivating and hypnotic writing from a prize-winning novelist, whose prose is reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson's and Paul Harding's.

New York, June 1961. The Bill Evans Trio, featuring twenty-five year old Scott LaFaro on bass, play a series of concerts at the Village Vanguard that will go down in musical history. Shortly afterwards, LaFaro is killed in a car accident, and Evans disappears. Intermission tells the story of what happens next.

In measured, evocative prose, Intermission takes a period from the life of one of America's great artists and fashions it into a fiction of extraordinary imaginative skill and ambition. The novel inhabits the lives of four people in orbit around a tragedy, presenting an intense and moving portrait of the burden of grief, and of a man lost to his family and to himself. It is also a conjuring of a pivotal moment in American music and culture, and a unique representation of the jazz scene in the early 1960s.

Intermission is a novel of pure control and power, certain to establish Owen Martell as one of the most promising young writers in Britain today.
By:  
Imprint:   Windmill Books
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 198mm,  Width: 129mm,  Spine: 13mm
Weight:   139g
ISBN:   9780099558828
ISBN 10:   0099558823
Pages:   192
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Owen Martell grew up in South Wales and studied at the universities of Aberystwyth and Oxford. He has published two previous novels in Welsh. He won the Wales Book of the Year Award for his first novel and was shortlisted for the same prize with his second novel. This is his first novel written in English.

Reviews for Intermission

Superb. * Irish Times * The mood music conjured up is evocative, reflective and muted...Martell's wonderful portrait...is as vivid as it is sympathetic...Lingers in the mind like an elusive, mournful melody. * Daily Mail * A sensitive depiction of an artist in mourning...A delicate and affecting work of fiction...[Martell] writes with elegant precision...Intermission is an impressive English-language debut, a deft and sensitive depiction of a family shadowed by loss. * Financial Times * This fine if elusive novel about a jazz giant echoes his art in both its style and its story-telling...A novel as oblique, elusive but quietly hypnotic as its hero's own playing. -- Boyd Tonkin * Independent * An introspective, original novel...It is hard to write about figures of recent history in a way that feels authentic and true, but Bill Evans is drawn here in all his quirkiness and mutability...This novel stands as a well-written lament. It is a clear-eyed exploration of a jazz intermission, of the forced break in the chaos, and an apt tribute to a music so full of life that even a pause, a silence, can go down howling. -- Esi Edugyan * Guardian *


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