Synopses & Reviews
Review
Praise for
Orkney"Sackville writes like a dream (in all senses), conveying both the uncanny power of love and the inscrutable heartbreak of loss."Kirkus
Synopsis
Following her wonderful debut,
The Still Point, Sackville returns with a strangely beautiful short novel about love and sex and obsession. A literature professor marries his prize student, a woman forty years his junior, and at her request he takes her to the sea for their honeymoon. He is embarked on his lifes work, a book about enchantment-narratives in literature, most all of them involving strange girls and women, but soon finds himself distracted by his own enchantment for his new white-haired young wife.
They travel to the Orkney Islands, the ancient Mesolithic and Neolithic site north of the Scottish coast, the Seal Islands,” a barren place of extraordinary beauty. And as the days of their honeymoon pass his desire and his constant, yearning contemplation become his normality. His mysterious bride becomes his entire universe.
He is consumed.
Synopsis
"A haunting novel" about sex and obsession, set off the coast of Scotland and "full of otherworldly emotion and strange impulses" (Marie Claire). A professor marries his prize student, a woman forty years his junior, and at her request, he takes her to the sea for their honeymoon. His life's work is a book about enchantment-narratives in literature, most of them involving strange girls and women--but soon he finds himself distracted by his own enchantment with his new white-haired young wife. They travel to the Orkney Islands, the ancient Mesolithic and Neolithic site north of the Scottish coast, a barren place of extraordinary beauty known as "the Seal Islands." And as the days of their honeymoon pass, his desire and his constant, yearning contemplation become his normality. His mysterious bride becomes his entire universe. He is consumed . . .
From the author of The Still Point, a winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, this is a novel that "will appeal to literature aficionados: a Lolita-esque love, a romance born out of academia, and folklore come to life" (Booklist).
"What begins as a familiar, almost fairytale-like narrative ends as something more fragmented, unsettling, and odd . . . Providing a brooding, bruised, ever-changing backdrop to all this is Orkney, the book's most compelling character of all. In a tribute to Virginia Woolf's experimental masterpiece, The Waves, the sea in Orkney functions as a kind of rhythmic talisman, its ebb and flow mirrored in the actions, ideas, and themes of the book. More than anything, Sackville's Orkney is a breathtaking place in the most literal of senses." --The Scotsman
About the Author
Amy Sackville was born in 1981. She studied English and Theatre Studies at Leeds, and went on to an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths. Her first novel was The Still Point. She teaches creative writing at the University of Kent.