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Slipping is a darkly humorous novel about life and love, ambition, bitter disappointment and the cost of committing the unforgivable.
When Albert Jackson, a middle-aged school teacher, catches a glimpse of the infinite universe and his own tiny insignificance he cannot shake himself free of regret for a life all but squandered. In a blind and demented attempt to salvage something from his life, he sets off, half-lucidly, on a libertine mission to reclaim life, to live it exclusively on his terms. But the wild and sinister crime he plots, so characterized by delusion, sets him on a path to irreversible destruction.
Incarcerated after his crime, at the once prestigious Reil Institute, and in a bid to make spiritual and cosmic amends, Albert Jackson employs the guile of a local novelist, Charlie Vaughan, to tell his story. In the telling of Albert's story, Charlie drives the narrative onward and backward, forcing Albert to confront the horrors of his crime. When the inadequacy of Albert's initial confession forces Charlie to search further afield, he must cede control of the narrative to a range of other narrators too, among them key witnesses to the events leading up to Albert's crime and a strange third-person account composed by Albert himself.
"Starred Review. Toomey is aiming to do more than solve a mystery and achieves a psychologically intriguing, unnerving character study." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Toomey is aiming to do more than solve a mystery and achieves a psychologically intriguing, unnerving character study." - Kirkus
This information about Slipping was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Toomey was born in 1975 in Dublin, where he now teaches English at Clonkeen College. He is the author of Sleepwalker and Huddleston Road.
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