Ash Before Oak

by Jeremy Cooper

Overview

Ash before Oak is a novel in the form of a fictional journal written by a solitary man on a secluded Somerset estate. Ostensibly a nature diary, chronicling the narrator’s interest in the local flora and fauna and the passing of the seasons, Ash before Oak is also the story of a breakdown told slantwise, and of the narrator’s subsequent recovery through his reengagement with the world around him. Written in prose that is as precise as it is beautiful, winner of the 2018 Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize, Jeremy Cooper’s first novel in over a decade is a stunning investigation of the fragility, beauty and strangeness of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910695890
Publisher:	Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication date:	09/24/2019
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of five previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum’s catalogue of artists’ postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC’s Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak.

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/30/2019

A disarming and gorgeously rendered portrait of interiority, Cooper’s novel, his U.S. debut, takes the form of a nature journal. In his 50s, the nameless and troubled narrator has moved from London to the southwest of England, revitalizing an old country estate. In short, often burstlike journal entries, he reveals himself to be less of a naturalist than an appreciator of nature; he regularly lacks names for and knowledge about the wildlife that surrounds him. But what lies beyond his lovely descriptions of his projects and his sightings is a searing and affecting tale of a man who has no desire to live. His daily goals become reasons for survival, and each date in the journal represents one more day he has not been defeated. The novel’s genius lies in what goes unsaid, and in the gaps between entries—what the narrator keeps from readers is the most haunting plot of all. This meandering novel is one of quiet beauty, and brief flashes of joy among seasons of despair. A study in how writing can give lives meaning, and in how it can fail to be enough to keep one afloat, this is a rare, delicate book, teeming with the stuff of real life. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

‘Very moving, beautiful and so thoughtful too – a wonderful evocation of animals and birds, sky and Somerset.’
— Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth

‘... what Cooper offers, very boldly and successfully, is a broad narrative arc of collapse and tentative recovery, in which a struggle for meaning and purpose in life assumes a desperate intensity.... Because of the narrator's inability to describe his anguish, what's mostly written here is not his pain, but his clinging to life: the beauty caught and traced, with great skill, in trying to overcome suffering. In its journal form, Ash before Oak salvages detritus, the unremarkable mess, banality and repetition of the everyday, just as the narrator works on restoring his dilapidated buildings in Somerset. And in a larger way, too, with admirable wisdom and precision, it salvages, from agonizing, ruinous thoughts and experiences, something transcendent, of lasting value.’
— Jerome Boyd Maunsell, Times Literary Supplement

‘Low-key and understated, this beautiful book ... is a civilised and melancholy document that slowly progresses towards a sense of enduring, going onwards, and even new life. It feels like a healing experience.’
— Phil Baker, The Sunday Times

‘A disarming and gorgeously rendered portrait of interiority ... The novel’s genius lies in what goes unsaid, and in the gaps between entries – what the narrator keeps from readers is the most haunting plot of all. This meandering novel is one of quiet beauty, and brief flashes of joy among seasons of despair. A study in how writing can give lives meaning, and in how it can fail to be enough to keep one afloat, this is a rare, delicate book, teeming with the stuff of real life.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘Mr. Cooper’s depiction of depression is powerful—and very challenging—in its artlessness. We do not follow a clean arc from near-death to recovery. Instead we find ourselves in the midst of a marathon, something grueling and repetitive and, though filled with hopeful pleasures, always dogged by despair.’
— Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher