Hawthorn and Child - Couverture souple

'An idiosyncratic and fascinating novel... refreshingly contemporary in language and style' -Zadie Smith

'The novel that has impressed, mesmerised and bamboozled me most this past year is Hawthorn and Child by Keith Ridgway. It begins as a police procedural, then spins outwards, never quite coming back to explain the mystery. A novel or a series of loosely connected short stories? I don't really care. Whatever it is, it's great.' -Ian Rankin, Guardian

'Ridgway's best compositions can be breathtakingly unpredictable ... At his best, Ridgway is unapologetically strange. And the writing is perfectly assured and elegant' --Scarlett Thomas, Guardian

'Ridgway writes with the keen sense of place and lucid, pared-down prose of a good crime novel, which makes the more outlandish deviations even more arresting'-Observer

'Not only in its dialogue, but in its bawdy subversiveness, Hawthorn and Child is a thoroughly Irish affair. Samuel Beckett and Flann O Brien come regularly to mind, although Keith Ridgway's blend of the grotesque and the absurd is all his own... An admirably conceived work of fiction' -Times Literary Supplement

'This unorthodox, word-of-mouth success follows a detective duo whose cases refuse to reach any neat resolution, instead heading off on dark, unpredictable tangents, the interlocking stories are too clever to be resisted.'-Sunday Express

'It sometimes seems as if the modernist tradition in Irish fiction has run its course. But Ridgway looks more and more a worthy inheritor of its best quality, the impulse to be fresh, startling and challenging without being wilful or arbitrary. Hawthorn and Child, with two policemen traversing London and trying to make sense of its crimes, is strange, disconcerting, often dark. It s also superbly written and compulsively readable.' --Irish Times

'His characters are so compelling and the situations in which he thrusts them so gripping ... it's worth reading Hawthorn and Child for the thrills alone ... And the black humour throughout is glorious' --Independent

Hawthorn and Child are mid-ranking detectives tasked with finding significance in the scattered facts. They appear and disappear in the fragments of this book along with a ghost car, a crime boss, a pick-pocket, a dead racing driver and a pack of wolves. The mysteries are everywhere, but the biggest of all is our mysterious compulsion to solve them. In Hawthorn & Child, the only certainty is that we've all misunderstood everything.