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Description
The city is a strange place for Jozef. After living in a Polish village for much of his life, he is struggling to adjust to the tall, grey landscape of apartment living, and his job in a local deli serving french fries and fried chicken to brash, self-assured children makes him feel even more disconnected from the surrounding population. It is only when he encounters TC, a troubled boy running away from school, that Jozef finds a kindred spirit with whom he can share his fascination with the natural world.
The two are noticed in a small litter-strewn park by a friendly local, the elderly and recently widowed Sophia, who has been attempting to spark an interest in nature in her granddaughter, Daisy. While Sophia sends Daisy letters each week about the growth of the flowers in the park, Jozef attempts to extract, over games of chess, the details of TC's troubled home life-left broken by the departure of the boy's father. Like leaves twisting in the wind, the lives of these four figures are blown together, defying the gravity affecting the world around them. That is, until the pressures of modern life intervene.
Product details
| Published | Feb 19 2013 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 272 |
| ISBN | 9781608199785 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Dimensions | 8 x 6 inches |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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A gently-evoked urban tragedy – and the most powerful and original debut novel I've read for years
A N Wilson, Readers Digest
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Clay moves to rhythms that we associate less with fiction than with the close-descriptive style of nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane ... At the heart of Clay is a hymn to attentiveness, both to the natural world and to those we share it with
Financial Times
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Instantly beautiful in its calm and wise tone
Robert Macfarlane
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Heartfelt, elegaic ... Lovingly observed
Sunday Times
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The wonderful power of her looking builds a quiet, cumulative poetry. An impressive debut
Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country
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Fierce and tender ... Country come to town with lyrical, visceral power ... She evokes with rhapsodic delight the animal and plant life that still flourishes amid the concrete and Tarmac
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

























