Before the Feast by Anthea Bell
- Sale Date
- ISBN
- 9781941040409
- Page Count
- 316
- Language
- English
- Imprint
- Tin House
Meet the Author
Anthea Bell
It’s the night before the feast in the village of Fürstenfelde (population: an odd number). The village is asleep. Except for the ferryman―he’s dead.
And Mrs. Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells―the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr. Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than to quit smoking.
Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football shirts bump into each other. They all want to bring something to a close, in this night before the feast.
And Mrs. Kranz, the night-blind painter, who wants to depict her village for the first time at night. A bell-ringer and his apprentice want to ring the bells―the only problem is that the bells have gone. A vixen is looking for eggs for her young, and Mr. Schramm is discovering more reasons to quit life than to quit smoking.
Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football shirts bump into each other. They all want to bring something to a close, in this night before the feast.
Praise for Before the Feast
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“A brilliant, quirky entertainment.”
Kirkus, STARRED Review -
“A village fully in the present, yet rife with legends. In Before The Feast, this villagetells its own story—a novel as compelling multi-voiced chorale put in prose.”
Leipzig Book Fair Jury Prize -
“We are glad. We are ecstatic, actually. We have an honest-to-God wordsmith in Saša Stanišic'. Only seldom does a work of literature embody the lyrical and the realistic simultaneously, the specific and the universal simultaneously, the body and the soul of the world, simultaneously. Stanišic's prose captures the official narrative and the myth, the dream and the rumor, the hearsay, all of it. It captures how we humans see what we later dare to call reality. I love it.”
Ismet Pric, author of SHARDS
About the Imprint
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