Corpus Christi
by Bret Anthony Johnston
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Pub Date 12 Feb 2015 | Archive Date 13 Feb 2015
John Murray Press | Two Roads
Description
*Best Book of the Year by the Independent and The Irish Times*
Set in the eye of life's storms Corpus Christi is an intensely moving collection of short stories by Bret Anthony Johnston, award-winning author of Remember Me Like This.
In Corpus Christi, Texas - a town often hit by hurricanes - parents, children, and lovers come together and fall apart, bonded and battered by memories of loss that they feel as acutely as physical pain. A car accident joins strangers linked by an intimate knowledge of madness. A teenage boy remembers his father's act of sudden and self-righteous violence. A 'hurricane party' reunites a couple whom tragedy parted. And, in an unforgettable three-story cycle, an illness heals a man's relationship with his mother and reveals the odd, shifting fidelity of truth to love.
Told in fresh, lyrical voices and taut, inventive styles, these narratives explore the complex volatility of love and intimacy, sorrow and renewal. Writing with tough humor, deep humanity, and a keen eye for the natural environment, Bret Anthony Johnston creates a world where cataclysmic events cut people loose from their 'regular lives, floating and spiraling away from where we had been the day before.'
Advance Praise
“Stunning and complex... It's hurricane country, and Johnston's exquisitely drawn men and women are riders on the storm, coping with an iffy emotional landscape that mirrors Corpus Christi's own, where the past is too easily washed away and the ocean has no memory.”LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Hard-eyed, life-affirming... These stories are relentlessly sober, large-hearted, and intense. In their pathos, to quote C. S. Lewis on Chaucer, "every fluctuation of gnawing hope, every pitiful subterfuge of the flattering imagination, is held up to our eyes without mercy" (The Allegory of Love); and yet their effect is spiritually bracing. We are human to the last.”BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE
“Fans of Raymond Carver's spare, carefully crafted stories will rejoice... [Johnston has] a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue and a dead-on eye for conjuring an entire universe with one simple detail... His ten stories are individual gems... Johnston's genius lies in weaving a web of optimism around a series of difficult topics. If [these stories] are read as they seem destined to be - obsessively, in one sitting - their rapt audience will turn the last page with a profound sense of calm.”SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781473611542 |
| PRICE | £9.99 (GBP) |
