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    Orkney
    Unavailable
    Orkney
    Unavailable
    Orkney
    Ebook209 pages3 hours

    Orkney

    By Amy Sackville

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “A haunting novel” about sex and obsession, set off the coast of Scotland and “full of otherworldly emotion and strange impulses” (Marie Claire).

    A professor marries his prize student, a woman forty years his junior, and at her request, he takes her to the sea for their honeymoon. His life’s work is a book about enchantment-narratives in literature, most of them involving strange girls and women—but soon he finds himself distracted by his own enchantment with his new white-haired young wife.

    They travel to the Orkney Islands, the ancient Mesolithic and Neolithic site north of the Scottish coast, a barren place of extraordinary beauty known as “the Seal Islands.” And as the days of their honeymoon pass, his desire and his constant, yearning contemplation become his normality. His mysterious bride becomes his entire universe. He is consumed . . .

    From the author of The Still Point, a winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, this is a novel that “will appeal to literature aficionados: a Lolita-esque love, a romance born out of academia, and folklore come to life” (Booklist).

    “What begins as a familiar, almost fairytale-like narrative ends as something more fragmented, unsettling, and odd . . . Providing a brooding, bruised, ever-changing backdrop to all this is Orkney, the book’s most compelling character of all. In a tribute to Virginia Woolf’s experimental masterpiece, The Waves, the sea in Orkney functions as a kind of rhythmic talisman, its ebb and flow mirrored in the actions, ideas, and themes of the book. More than anything, Sackville’s Orkney is a breathtaking place in the most literal of senses.” —The Scotsman
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 1, 2013
    ISBN9781619022089
    Unavailable
    Orkney

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    Reviews for Orkney

    4/5

    29 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Slight but poetic. A literature professor marries an enigmatic, beautiful pupil 40 years his junior, taking her to her Orkney birthplace for their honeymoon. As the days slip past, he is ever more obsessed with her and her secret history, and she is ever more obsessed by the sea. Is she real? Does she love him? Will he become an echo of Merlin to her Niviane? Don't expect a clean resolution - this is an exploration of mythical tropes, deliberately left open to the reader to bring colour into the northern fog.
    • 4/5
      A wonderfully written short novel that gave me serious prose envy. The plot is slight and predictable, but this is one of those books where it doesn't matter. The atmosphere Sackville creates is a delight to be caught up in. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      An interesting and poetic tale laced with Orcadian folklore.
    • 3/5
      The lady in the bookshop said she had read this - she had to, it was featured at a literary festival she was organising - and described the author's voice as new. I thought that at the beginning but then became frustrated by the sea, the spray and the Orkney wind. It is the story of an ageing professor who has become obsessed with a young student. This isn't the first time a novel has been created around this theme. They marry and spend a 'honeymoon' on a remote Orkney island. Nightmares about the sea wake her up every night, she spends most of the day on the sea edge, blown about by the wind; he spends his days looking through a window at her out by the sea, blown about the wind. He starts to get jealous and at nudge, nudge comments of people they meet, silly old feel/young girl. Sea tales and legends arise, they get salt in their mouth from sea and sex - and in the end I wasn't too unhappy when she disappeared. The best part was the mental turmoil, bordering on despair, of a man aware of impending retirement, loneliness and loss of youth and credibility.