Broken Ghost - Hardcover

Griffiths, Niall

3.69

108 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224097938 ISBN 13: 9780224097932

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2019

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A Welsh community is drawn together and blown apart by a strange vision in the mountains: the huge spectre of a woman floating over a ridge. The people who live here in these mountains already have their own demons – drink, drugs, domestic violence, psychoses – but each character has a different experience of this strange apparition, a different reaction, and for some it will change everything. Is it a collective hallucination? A meteorological phenomenon? Whatever it is, they all saw something, early one morning on the shores of a mountain lake, something that will awaken in them powers and passions and, perhaps, a possibility of healing these broken people in a broken country.

An examination of modern humanity’s desperate need to live meaningfully and vividly in a mediated world – where individual autonomy is lost and the collective heart is atomised and exploited – this is a novel that gives voices to the marginalised, the dispossessed, the forgotten. Disturbing and unforgettable, darkly funny and deeply moving, written in a charged language that is vernacular, lyrical and hieratic all at once, Broken Ghost is – simultaneously – a howl of anguish and a summoning of gods.

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Review:

"Novel by novel, Niall Griffiths’s exploration of transgressive, desperate lives has become essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Britain today. His latest book, the deeply intelligent Broken Ghost, combines myth, drug culture and iconoclastic political vision in a wild music that’s also a call to arms. This important book outstrips even its own virtuoso literary technique." (Fiona Sampson New Statesman, *Books of the Year*)

"Griffiths has forged a chimerical piece of radical fiction, a Blake-like reverie on the possibility (or not) of spiritual regeneration in our time... what triumphs in Broken Ghost is the treasurable ecstasy of its lyrical flights. Griffiths’ prose can explode into vatic communication with the Earth around us – it is a pantheistic celebration, a Dionysian prayer to organic life and decay... This important novel comes from a tradition: from the green fuse of Dylan Thomas and Caradoc Evans, the unstable religiosity of RS Thomas. The result, though, is something new, a profane, passionate response to nature and to the countryside, which is rarely encountered in contemporary British fiction any more." (Guardian)

"This is a book powered along with ferocious momentum by the raw nervous energy of its characters, whose demotic, alternating narratives seem to muscle bodily off the page." (Stephanie Cross Daily Mail)

"Niall Griffiths has, like Kelman, crafted a sophisticated literary voice for the kind of people routinely dismissed not even as old-school proletarians but as a worthless “feral underclass”... It rewards us with soaring lyricism, the bite and drive of its vernacular voices, and the recurrent search for “something transcendent” in natural beauty, in human love, in the rapture of consciousness itself, in the ancient rhythms and cycles of the land." (The Arts Desk)

"Pairing Irvine Welsh’s demotic vim with the conspiratorial frisson of a David Peace novel, Broken Ghost is strange and compelling." (Observer)

About the Author:

Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He has published six previous novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Stump, Wreckage, Runt and A Great Big Shining Star.

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