The Clerkenwell Press launches

29 March 2011

The Clerkenwell Press launches with a South African debut, a German bestseller and a masterly evocation of Arthur Rimbaud.

Geoff Mulligan’s new Clerkenwell Press imprint launches in Autumn 2011 with three outstanding international authors. Alastair Bruce’s debut, Wall of Days and Judith Hermann’s Alice will be published in August. American author Bruce Duffy’s Disaster Was My God will follow in November.

Wall of Days by Alastair Bruce
In a world all but drowned, a man called Bran has been living on an island for ten years. He was sent there in exile by those whose leader he was, and he tallies on the wall of his cave the days as they pass. Until the day when something happens that kindles in Bran such memories and longing that he persuades himself to return, even if it means execution.

Wall of Days is a profoundly moving novel about guilt, loss and remembering.

In his native South Africa Bruce has been described as ‘a novelistic embodiment of Jorge Luis Borges sitting in a corner watching Samuel Beckett and JM Coetzee pleasuring that prostitute who is the postmodern muse’. André Brink has called him ‘a consummate storyteller who appears well set to become a defining novelist of our time’. Alastair Bruce now lives in London.

Alice by Judith Hermann
When someone very close to you dies your whole life changes. Everything is different. Alice’s life will change five times…
Judith Hermann tells of days of transition, of waiting, of holding on and letting go – and of how clear and dazzling such days can be.

Alice was published to critical acclaim in Germany, having sold 50,000 copies in hardback and has been translated into 8 languages. The Independent has called the Berlin-based author ‘a master storyteller’, describing her 2002 novel, The Summer House, Later as ‘an elegant and perceptive reading on the emptiness that fills our lives. ‘

With ‘the breadth of an epic novel condensed into five interlinking short stories’ (Hugo Hamilton) Alice is a work of exceptional power and beauty from one of Europe’s finest writers.

Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy
A brilliantly imagined novel based on the scandalous and astonishing life of the pioneering, proto-punk poet Arthur Rimbaud. Bruce Duffy takes the bare facts of Rimbaud’s fascinating existence and brings them vividly to life in a story rich with people, places, and paradox. He conveys, as few ever have, the inner turmoil of this calculating genius of outrage, whose work and untidy life did much to anticipate the twentieth century’s culture of rebellion.

The third novel by American author of The World As I Saw It (described by the Los Angeles Times as ‘a novel constructed out of the lives, thoughts, appetites, egos, the very toenails and pocketwatches of Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore…astonishing…’), Disaster Was My God will be published in the UK in November 2011.

Publication details:
Wall of Days by Alastair Bruce, August 2011, £11.99 paperback original, ISBN 9781846688003

Alice by Judith Hermann, August 2011, £8.99 paperback original, ISBN 9781846685273

Disaster Was My God by Bruce Duffy, November 2011, £14.99 paperback original, ISBN 9781846685279

For more information please contact Ruth Killick 0207 841 6307 / ruth.killick@profilebooks.com

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