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Ann Patchett’s second novel to be published in the UK, following the Orange Prize-shortlisted ‘The Magician’s Assistant’.
John Nickel is a black ex-jazz musician who only wants to be a good father. When his son is taken away to Miami by his mother, Nickel is left with nothing but Muddy’s, the Memphis blues bar that he manages. Then he hires Fay Taft, a young white waitress from east Tennessee who has a volatile brother, Carl, in tow. They spell nothing but trouble for Nickel. Fay stirs up both romantic and paternal impulses in him and Carl is clearly a no-good.
But Nickel finds himself consumed with the idea of Taft, Fay and Carl’s dead father, and begins to reconstruct the life of a man he never met but whose place he has taken.
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Review:
Families are not simply made up of blood relations; this Ann Patchett understands better than most. John Nickel used to be a jazz drummer, but now runs a bar in Memphis, Tennessee; the mother of his son has taken the boy away, to unimaginable Florida; Nickel is left to find family where he can. What he finds are the Tafts: Fay and Carl, sister and brother, adrift in Memphis after the death of their father, the Taft of the title. Nickel gives Fay a job as a waitress; twice her age, black when she is white, he is torn by the nature of his feelings for her, drifting uneasily as they do between fatherly and sensual.
Review:
As in her later novel, The Magician's Assistant, the spiritual motor of the novel is a character dead at its beginning: Taft, the absent father. Bereft of his own son, Nickel conjures Taft as the perfect father to children lost without him. But this is a darker novel, its ending less hopeful--less magical, though Patchett's prose is wonderfully beguiling--but perhaps more truthful for that.--Erica Wagner
'As resonant as a blues song ... Expect miracles when you read Ann Patchett's fiction.' -- New York Times
'Taft shows the author's skill at putting herself - and her readers - in another skin ... Her skill is simply extraordinary.' -- Erica Wagner, The Times
'The emotional ties are so taut that the merest touch from Patchett sets everything jangling. A marvellously understated book.' -- Guardian
'Taft shows the author's skill at putting herself - and her readers - in another skin ... Her skill is simply extraordinary.' -- Erica Wagner, The Times
'The emotional ties are so taut that the merest touch from Patchett sets everything jangling. A marvellously understated book.' -- Guardian
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- PublisherFourth Estate
- Publication date2020
- ISBN 10 1841150495
- ISBN 13 9781841150499
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages256
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