Tell

‘I can talk for as long as you like, no problem. You’ll just ha ve to tell me when to stop. How far back do you want to take it?’

Tell is a probing and compelling examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s. Jonathan Buckley’s novel is structured as a series of interview transcripts with a woman who worked as a gardener for a wealthy businessman and art collector who has mysteriously disappeared.

The joint winner of The Novel Prize, Tell is a work of strange and intoxicating immediacy that explores money, art and industry, the intimacy and distance between social classes, and the complex fluidity of memory.

Praise for Jonathan Buckley:

‘Buckley’s fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key...every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.’ — Michel Faber, The Guardian

‘Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.’ — Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Jonathan Buckley is a writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton. In 2015 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘Briar Road’, and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. Tell, his twelfth novel, was the joint winner of The Novel Prize in 2023 and will be published in 2024 by Giramondo Publishing, New Directions and Fitzcarraldo Editions.