Snug

by Matthew Tree

Overview

Coldwater Bay - a tiny village tucked away on the southern coast of the Isle of Wight - suddenly finds itself being besieged by Africans who have gone there for that very purpose. A racist doctor on holiday, two of his love-sick teenage wards, and the Africans' inside man in the village watch events unfold from their very different viewpoints, in this ambitious, original novel which steers a captivating path between the comic and the horrific.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9788461631148
Publisher:	Snug
Publication date:	03/22/2013
Pages:	454
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.01(d)

About the Author

MATTHEW TREE was born in London at the tail end of 1958. He has lived in Barcelona since 1984.
For literary reasons of his own, in 1990 he stopped writing in English and switched to Catalan, in which language he has published ten books, including two novels, a collection of short stories, an autobiography, a rant against work, and a personal essay on racism. In English he has published a collection of articles and essays 'Barcelona, Catalonia. A View From The Inside' (Cookwood Press, Mass. USA). 'Snug' is his first published novel written in his native tongue.

SNUG was chosen by The Bookbag magazine as one of the ten best self-published books in the UK in 2014, in all categories.

Editorial Reviews

2013-10-21
Mysterious visitors to an isolated British seaside resort bring on a backlash of violence. Tree (Barcelona, Catalonia: A View from the Inside, 2011, etc.) has created a witty, frightening book lancing British arrogance, racism and smugness. Told in the voices of several characters, including the racist, anti-Semitic Dr. Whitebone; his 14-year-old daughter, Lucy; and her horny 12-year-old friend, whom she calls the Boy Who Shall Be Nameless, or BWSBN, the novel recounts a series of strange events and the muddled, misguided and violent reactions they precipitate. On vacation in Coldwater Bay on the Isle of Wight, Dr. Whitebone, his family and young guests soon find entrance to and egress from the village blocked and the phone lines cut. The doctor enlists the help of a local police officer and singles out the village's lone black resident and a family of rich Arabs for secret torture. Eventually, a group of Africans emerges from the village's sea caves to explain how and why they've sealed off Coldwater Bay. They're a kind of expeditionary force responding to centuries of European colonization and brutalization of their continent. They've come in peace and make the village a kind of Club Med. Trying to be a hero to Lucy, however, the BWSBN escapes and alerts the authorities, then rides along in a helicopter as British jet fighters secretly bomb the Africans as they're peacefully leaving for France in a trawler. Years later, more sordid details emerge. BWSBN, now 21, alcoholic and impotent, runs into Lucy in London and gets the full scoop: the torture and death of the black man, the beating death of the rich Arab patriarch--both innocent--and the trial and acquittal of Dr. Whitebone for the black man's death. BWSBN is horrified, but the one-time love of his life has smugly decided, like her compatriots in a broader context, that it's all for the best: "They're different from us….They had no business being here." Though Tree moved from England to Spain and began writing in Catalan after suffering from writer's block in his native tongue, this novel proves his facility with English. His prose sparkles with razor's-edge wit reminiscent of the great British satirists, though in a gentler way and with a core of disillusion and dismay. A finely written, disturbingly pointed indictment of British colonialism and racism and that fester in an insular smugness "where life is indeed an island…bristling with complacency."

Kirkus Reviews