UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · FICTION · PSYCHOLOGICAL
Glen Duncan
Glen Duncan is a British author born in 1965 in Bolton, Lancashire, England to an Anglo-Indian family. He studied philosophy and literature at the universities of Lancaster and Exeter. In 1990 Duncan moved to London, where he worked as a bookseller for four years, writing in his spare time. In 1994 he visited India with his father (part roots odyssey, part research for a later work, The Bloodstone Papers) before continuing on to the United States, where he spent several months travelling the country by Amtrak train, writing much of what would become his first novel, Hope, published to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic in 1997. His novel I, Lucifer was published in 2002.
I, Lucifer, Fallen Angel, Prince of Darkness, Bringer of Light, Ruler of Hell, Lord of the Flies, Father of Lies, Apostate Supreme, Tempter of Mankind, Old Serpent, Prince of This World, Seducer, Accuser, Tormentor, Blasphemer, and without doubt Best Fuck in the Seen and Unseen Universe (ask Eve, that minx) have decided - oo-la-la! - to tell all.
— from I, Lucifer, 2002
Most acclaimed
The bloodstone papers
Switching seamlessly between the chaos and bloodshed of 1940s India and the multicultural melange of twenty-first-century Britain, Glen Duncan's sublime new novel finds love in both.Ross Monroe is a boxing railwayman with a weakness for get-rich-quick schemes. Kate Lyle is a headstrong young woman desperate to escape a sexually predatory household. Both are Anglo-Indians, members of a race that helped turn the wheels of Empire for years. But Empire days are numbered, and as India sheds its colonial skin, the young lovers must face their own tryst with destiny.In twenty-first-century England, Owen Monroe is writing this story of his parents' lives in an effort to avoid the problems in his own: lost love, relentless libido, dreams of death, and a world full of headlines he can't understand and doesn't want to. But keeping past and present apart isn't as easy as it seems, and before long Owen is deep in the one story he never wanted to tell....Epic in its scope yet never losing sight of the telling, gorgeous detail, The Bloodstone Papers is an extraordinarily rich and beautiful read that manages to ask the big questions without fuss and to accept that the big answers aren't always what we want to hear.
A day and a night and a day
2009
In a windowless cell, a man hangs from a pair of handcuffs.He is an american.His torturer will stop at nothing to extract the information he requires.He, too, is an american.A Day and a Night and a Day is a Grand Inquisition for the twenty-first century, in which love, loyalty, reason, and truth are on trial, and morality hangs in the balance. It is the story of Augustus Rose, an unlikely operative in a terrorist network, and his interrogator, Harper, a ruthless ambassador for the darkest forces at work in our times.Beyond the law and without hope of escape or reprieve, Augustus endures an emotional and physical assault that brings his whole life under brutal scrutiny: his race, religion, politics, and past, the people he has loved, and the few he is still desperate to protect. Alone and certain of death, Augustus raises the only shield he has: memory.He remembers his outcast Euro-American mother, Juliet, whose erratic love was refuge from the unforgiving streets of Harlem in the 1950s; he recalls the strange solace of Elise Merkete, the ravaged vigilante who recruited him into the ranks of her underground army; he relives the cool touch of the young Spanish prostitute, Ines, perhaps the last female tenderness he's ever likely to know.Outshining them all is the memory of Selina, a stunning, troubled, and rebellious white New York aristocrat. Their epic, taboo love affair, begun in 1960s Manhattan, would yield a lifetime's worth of passion, heartbreak, and wanderlust, leading Augustus from Harlem to Greenwich Village, from El Salvador to Barcelona, from Morocco to a bleak British island where death seems his only companion.Dramatic, far-reaching, and beautifully written, A Day and a Night and a Day is both a piercing love story and a timely, harrowing evaluation of the shape the Western world is taking.
Hope
2005
This, the debut novel of British author Glen Duncan, sets the stage for what is to come in his body of work and is a very fine, ambitious debut novel in itself. An intimate, breathtaking, passionate first-person narrative voice, confiding confessional-style to you, reader, often, but telling you to "f-ck off" as it scents your inevitable judgment of the character. Unforgettable scenes, hyper-realized in their attention to detail. Off-the-cuff improvisations on topics connected to the narrative that are laugh-out-loud funny. Sentences so true and so perfectly put you want to share them with everyone you know. Existential musings. Daring engagement with some of the darkest of which humanity is capable. A steady character development that endears the characters to you, no matter what awful things they may do. A focus on a relationship so tender and beautiful and real that it eventually glows with the same warm light that the better memories of your own do. Sudden, jagged twists in the narrative that make you question whether you want to keep reading the book. A consistent literary, intelligent, highly allusive and effusive quality that answers that question, "YES," no matter how repelled you were moments ago. As a novel, it does not have much plot. It is a person's life, being written in pieces, jumping between the present and very recent and college days and childhood. It is alternating scenes and meditations. It attempts to honor the range in life and never cheat. There are many themes, but at its propulsive center is a love so good and so real that it defined the narrator's life, even as he was aware he did not "deserve" it. The fact that this love was lost, driven away, really, by the narrator, and his fall into an addiction, is what the narrator is trying to come to terms with, along with what to make of life, reality, and himself in the wake of its failing. In the process, he candidly engages in exorcising demons about sexual experiences that juxtapose the sanctity of those within the lost relationship's: experiences of horror eventually revealed from childhood and ongoing experiences with a prostitute who calls herself Hope, which interact with a history of the narrator's involvement with consuming pornography and the effects it has had on his psyche or soul. As an examination of human perversity and the duality of exalting sublime heights & horrifying wretched depths between which man finds himself cast, this novel finds Duncan with only Poe as a competitor.