Prendergast’s Fall

Prendergast’s Fall by David Cameron

Published by: Into Books
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781527241848
Pages: 416

This is the story of a fall. It won’t take a minute.

Businessman, son, husband, lover, father, Martin Prendergast stands on an office ledge, contemplating a fall that may be physical, psychological, or both. As he descends, scenes from his life unfold in reverse: his failing marriage to Rosemary, a routine affair, estranged children, his mother’s dementia, and the heart condition that may claim him as it claimed his beloved father. Yet beneath these familiar causes of despair lies a deeper, more tragic love story that has shaped his life.

The novel can be read in either direction, from chapter 27 to chapter 0 or from 0 to 27. Read backwards, Prendergast’s apparent reasons for suicide gradually dissolve as childhood memories reveal a growing sense of possibility, longing, and hope. Read forwards, that possibility slowly contracts into disappointment and despair. Combining surreal imagery with existential reflection, the novel explores how memory, love, family, and circumstance shape a life—and how the meaning of that life can change depending on where its story begins.

It is what used to be called an existentialist novel, but here the existential angst isn’t that of an artistic hero-outsider but of an Everyman – though one who ‘always sickened after something’.  It’s the work of a writer who has been described as ‘one of the most insightful and thought-provoking poets around’ (Ron Butlin, Sunday Herald Books of the Year, 2016).

Writer – David Cameron

David Cameron was born in Glasgow in 1966, grew up in East Kilbride, studied English Literature at the University of Aberdeen, and now lives near Belfast. In 2014 he received the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry. He is the author of four books of fiction, three books of poetry, and a critical study of Samuel Beckett. Champions of his writing over the years have included Seamus Heaney (‘strangeness and credibility at the same time’), Dermot Healy, Ron Butlin, Iain Crichton Smith, Liz Lochhead and Robert Nye (‘a quality of verbal alchemy by which it transmutes the base matter of common experience into something like gold’).

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