The Geometer Lobachevsky

Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize

By: Adrian Duncan

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Paperback | 29 August 2023

At a Glance

Paperback
208 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 12.9 x 1.5

Paperback

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An inventive and original Irish writer arrives at the Tuskar Rock list on a wave of prize listings and critical prestige

'When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology ...'

It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'.

Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again

Industry Reviews

'Uncanny, strange and exquisite, akin to the Mitteleuropean fictions of Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Milan Kundera' - Financial Times

'A masterful meditation on exile ... by one of our most original writers' - Irish Independent

'He brings a mixture of the exact and the visionary ... an original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms' - Colm Toibin

'One of the most important, original and intriguing writers working now' - Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy

'Many have seen the tendency among Irish writers, from Joyce and Beckett
up to Eimear McBride, towards experimentation as originating in this sense of
foundational linguistic dispossession. With this novel, Duncan proves himself
to be one of the most subtle explorers of this condition writing today' - Kevin Brazil

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