The Traveller and Other Stories

by Stuart Neville, John Connolly Narrated by Gerard Doyle

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The Traveller and Other Stories is full of modern-day folktales, ghosts (both of the supernatural sort and the even more frightening ones—those who disappear from our lives) and fire. Fire moves through several stories scattered throughout the book. The heat is necessary because chills are what ones gets at the end of each of Neville’s stories.

A darkly glittering collection of Northern Irish noir by Stuart Neville, Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning author

Since his debut novel, the modern classic The Ghosts of Belfast, was published a decade ago, Stuart Neville has published eight other critically acclaimed novels and achieved international recognition as one of crime fiction's great living writers.

Now for the first time Neville offers readers a collection of his short fiction-twelve chilling stories that traverse and blend the genres of noir, horror, and speculative fiction, and which bring the history and lore of Neville's native Northern Ireland to glittering life. The collection concludes with the longawaited novella The Traveller, the companion piece to The Ghosts of Belfast and Collusion.

Complete with a foreword from Irish crime fiction legend John Connolly, this volume is the perfect indulgence for fans of ghost stories and noir, and is a must-have for devotees of Neville's prizewinning Belfast novels.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

A South Florida Sun-Sentinel Best Mystery Book of 2020  

Praise for The Traveller and Other Stories

"Chilling . . . These stories have an uncanny power to convince. The best of Mr. Neville’s ghost tales can hold their own with those of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen. But the ultimate prize-winner here, 'Coming in on Time,' a heartbreaking vignette of domestic tragedy seen through the eyes of its youngest victim, hasn’t a trace of the supernatural—only the horror of innocence encountering evil."
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal

“No matter the nature and circumstance of the plots, Neville shows his storytelling mastery in tales that inevitably climax with sentences loaded in desolation.”
—Jack Batten, The Toronto Star

"Noir, noir, noir—everybody wants to write noir fiction. But most self-anointed 'noir' narratives just don’t hack it. They’re dark and dreary, to be sure; but a true noir mystery must also have a black heart. This kind of spiritual despair comes naturally to Stuart Neville, whose Belfast crime novels bleed."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Splendid . . . This chilling assortment of Northern Irish noir is not to be missed."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review  

"Irish noir done to a turn, with just enough tearful sentiment to turn the screws tighter."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Neville, author of The Ghosts of Belfast, turns from thrilling mystery to chilling horror. Thirteen macabre tales feature killers and specters sure to haunt your dreams for days to come. Neville sets his stories amidst his native Irish shores, filling each yarn with a hint of the old country. This blend of genres conjures nightmarish realities to create a bone-chilling collection."
—The Lineup

"Hauntingly delicious . . . If you want to give friends an unexpected and highly memorable trick-or-treat, get a couple of extra copies of this collection. Make sure to ink your name into your own copy, so it won't walk away lightly. It will be, indeed, haunted."
—Kingdom Books

Praise for Stuart Neville
 
“A rare example of legitimate noir fiction.”
—The New York Times Book Review 
 
“Tightly wound, emotionally resonant . . . Displays an acute understanding of the true state of Northern Ireland, still under the thumb of decades of violence.”
—Los Angeles Times
 
"The current master of neo-noir detective fiction."
—The Boston Globe
 
“A brilliant thriller, unbearably tense, stomach-churningly frightening . . . A future classic.”
—The Observer
 
“A great, brawling ache of a novel . . . filled with both prickling suspense and fiercely wrought emotion.”
—Megan Abbott
 
“A flat-out terror trip.”
—James Ellroy
 
“An exceptional talent. Crime fiction doesn’t get much better.”
—Lee Child

Kirkus Reviews

2020-08-19
Life in contemporary Ireland is bracketed in these 12 tales—all but one of them reprints—by the experiences of young people who’ve scarcely tasted it and veterans who wish they hadn’t.

Neville’s foreword notes the pleasure he takes in writing stories that provide a break from the long-haul commitments of his novels. But that break is severely limited by both the stories’ thematic consistency and their recycling of characters and plotlines from the novels. The six stories in “New Monsters,” the first part of the collection, focus on innocents, mostly children, forced all too early in life to confront the ghosts of the past. A boy struggles to deal with the sudden absence of his mother in “Coming in on Time.” The title character of “Echo” is defined by his uncanny bond to the sister who died before he was born. “London Safe” tracks a grown man’s ill-fated reunion with the father who left him as a child. In the second part, “Old Friends,” the focus shifts to the ghosts themselves, dead-eyed souls like IRA hard case Gerry Fegan (last seen in The Ghosts of Belfast, 2009) and aging killer Albert Ryan (from Ratlines, 2013), who can’t forget the violent roles they’ve taken in the Troubles. Child and ghost collide most memorably in The Traveller, the concluding novella, in which Ellen McKenna, the daughter of pensioned cop Jack Lennon (from The Final Silence, 2014), is caught in the crossfire between her father and the nameless assassin, long presumed dead, who’s targeted him for a client who, like everyone else in Neville’s remorseless world, just can’t let the past go.

Irish noir done to a turn, with just enough tearful sentiment to turn the screws tighter.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178467114
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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