He Wants

by Alison Moore

Overview

Lewis Sullivan lives less than a mile from his childhood home. His grown-up daughter visits every day, bringing soup, and he spends his evenings at his second favorite pub for half a shandy and sausage. But when an old friend appears, Lewis finds his comfortable life shaken up, and he longs for more excitement. A modern-day Death in Venice by the author of Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse, He Wants is charged and unpredictable.

Alison Moore is the author of one previous novel, The Lighthouse, and a short story collection The Pre-War House. She lives in Nottingham, England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771960564
Publisher:	Biblioasis
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 7.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and the National Book Awards 2012 (New Writer of the Year), winning the McKitterick Prize 2013. Her shorter fiction has been published in Best British Short Stories anthologies and in her debut collection, The Pre-War House and Other Stories, whose title story won a novella prize. Born in Manchester in 1971, she lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/02/2016
Through spare prose and a simple story, Moore's second novel (her first, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize) examines aging, interrogates wanting, proposes changing, and succeeds in convincing the reader that old dogs can still be taught. Lewis Sullivan, an elderly widower, has settled into the routine of a man without much desire left. His wife, Edie, died in her sleep. His daughter, Ruth, visits him daily, bringing him soup he does not want but eats anyway, and he in turn visits his own old father in a nursing home once a week. This routine continues until Sydney Flynn, a friend Lewis hasn't seen since grade school, reappears and undermines the idea that doing things the way one has always done things is the only way to live. Writers of fiction are often advised to drive plot by first establishing what their protagonist wants. Moore plays with this concept by enumerating those desires in chapter titles, and then ensuring her characters never succeed in getting what they want. This playfulness and the sympathetic and surprising character of Lewis make this artful novel a delightful read. Agent: Nicholas Royle. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Acclaim for He Wants

“[Moore’s] playfulness and the sympathetic and surprising character of Lewis make this artful novel a delightful read.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Following her Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse, Alison Moore’s artistically pleasing second novel is ... a story of ageing and thwarted desire in which a man drifts away from his moorings into Dionysian impulses, after a lifetime spent serving the values of the humdrum contemporary community in which he lives ...”—Rachel Cusk, The Guardian

“A nuanced, haunting tale of desire and repressed longing, and a very creditable successor to her quietly stellar debut, The Lighthouse.”—James Kidd, The Independent

“Moore movingly mines the aching gap between aspiration and actuality.”—Anita Sethi, The Observer

“The quietness of this novel will make you prick up your ears; this is storytelling that invites and sustains careful attention. [Suffused] with an elusive sadness ... the novel’s conclusion both satisfies and bewilders.”—Heather Birrell, Toronto Star

"An exercise in withholding and revelation ... the climax is perfectly, subtly performed, and beautifully written. DH Lawrence fans in particular should take note."—Kerry Clare, Pickle Me This

"Extraordinary, unique, compelling, and deftly crafted from beginning to end."—Midwest Book Review

Acclaim for Alison Moore and her previous novel, The Lighthouse

“Moore’s writing has a superb sense of the weight of memory.” - The Times

“Though sparely told, the novel’s simple-seeming narrative has the density of far longer work. People and places are intricately evoked with a forensic feel for mood.” - The Daily Mail

“It is this accumulation of the quotidian, in prose as tight as Magnus Mills’s, which lends Moore’s book its standout nature, and brings the novel to its ambiguous, thrilling end.” - The Telegraph

“The Lighthouse looks simple but isn't, refusing to unscramble what seems a bleak moral about the hazards of reproduction, in the widest sense. Small wonder that it stood up to the crash-testing of a prize jury's reading and rereading. One of the year's 12 best novels? I can believe it.” - The Observer

From the Publisher