In vitro fertilization is the trigger for a young woman whose identity crisis and misguided fantasies take her on a mysterious journey to the end of the world.
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.
"Thomson's seamless prose style and striking minor characters round out this satisfying, offbeat narrative." - Publishers Weekly
"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
"A book that promises insight into the emotional detachment of our current technological overload should deliver more than the resolution of daddy issues." - Kirkus Reviews
"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." - 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
"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
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Photo: Robin Farquhar-Thomson
Rupert Thomson is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including Katherine Carlyle; Secrecy; The Insult, which was short-listed for the Guardian Fiction Prize and selected by David Bowie as one of his 100 Must-Read Books of All Time; The Book of Revelation, which was made into a feature film by Ana Kokkinos; and Death of a Murderer, which was short-listed for the Costa Novel of the Year Award. His memoir, This Party's Got to Stop, was named Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Book of the Year. He lives in London.
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