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In the late 80s, Katherine Carlyle is created using IVF. Stored as a frozen embryo for eight years, she is then implanted in her mother and given life. By the age of nineteen Katherine has lost her mother to cancer, and feels her father to be an increasingly distant figure. Instead of going to college, she decides to disappear, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing-ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scene for a courageous leap from false empowerment to true empowerment.
Written in the beautifully spare, lucid and cinematic prose that Thomson is known for, Katherine Carlyle uses the modern techniques of IVF and cryopreservation to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about where we come from, what we make of ourselves, and how we are loved.
Written in the beautifully spare, lucid and cinematic prose that Thomson is known for, Katherine Carlyle uses the modern techniques of IVF and cryopreservation to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about where we come from, what we make of ourselves, and how we are loved.
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Reviews
Thomson's story is a profound look at love, loss and the need to belong.
This riveting and visionary story haunted me long after I finished the last page. Katherine Carlyle is an extraordinary novel
Thomson's ability to create a world that feels entirely original and untouched by any other mind is at full strength in this strange and haunting book ... It's the strongest and most original novel I've read for a very long time
An unnerving, unputdownable road trip from Rome to the far north, narrated by a young woman who, through the wonders of science, was "born twice"
Rupert Thomson's writing serves as an augmentor of your own imagination. As with Secrecy, Katherine Carlyle immediately transports you into an ever-expanding, yet intimate cinematic experience. I absolutely loved it.
Thomson is a hypnotic writer. His prose is precise and controlled, his images intriguingly dreamlike. Katherine Carlyle leaves a sharp, visceral afterimage in its wake; much of its staying power lies in Thomson's ability to send the reader's imagination beyond its final page.
Rupert Thomson's twilight worlds have long enchanted many readers, and this road trip through a snow dome of mesemeric hallucinations is Thomson at his best.
Written with the verve, pace and detail of a spy novel, sleek and oddly honest, this is the fascinating story of Katherine Carlyle who mysteriously decides that instead of university and a privileged life she will erase her identity and much of her emotions and go untraceably to the most remote settlement of the Russian north. She is not seeking love. She is determined to have abandoned it.
Smart, stylish, inventive, and always entertaining, Rupert Thomson displays enormous range as a novelist. His prose is consistently sharp, his ideas consistently intriguing. I would read any book that Rupert Thomson wrote.
Rupert Thomson is so undervalued, such a pure novelist. He explores what interests him in the way that I most admire. Not trying to demonstrate its relevancy or extend his own argument; Instead, each novel is etched into reality by his curiosity.
Rupert Thomson is one of the most interesting, adventurous writers working in fiction today.
Unfolding in the acclaimed Thomson's characteristically lucid and sensuous prose, this entirely unsentimental novel is as absorbing as it is affecting.