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Lean Fall Stand

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What to expect

A WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR

‘It leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story’ Hilary Mantel

The highly anticipated new novel from the Costa-award winning, three-times Booker-longlisted author of Reservoir 13.

When an Antarctic research expedition goes wrong, the consequences are far-reaching – for the men involved and for their families back home.

Robert "Doc" Wright, a veteran of Antarctic field work, holds the clues to what happened, but he is no longer able to communicate them. While Anna, his wife, navigates the sharp contours of her new life as a carer, Robert is forced to learn a whole new way to be in the world.

Award-winning novelist Jon McGregor returns with a stunning novel that mesmerizingly and tenderly unpicks the notion of heroism and explores the indomitable human impulse to tell our stories – even when words fail us. A meditation on the line between sacrifice and selfishness this is a story of the undervalued, unrecognised courage it can take just to get through the day.

’So moving and delicate and terrifying and haunting’ Maggie O’Farrell

Critics Review

  • Praise for Lean Fall Stand:

    ‘Gripping, moving, magnificent’ Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

    ‘Jon McGregor has crafted a unique narrative, encompassing frozen wastes & altered interior landscapes. The most gripping piece of writing I’ve read in a long time: Sit. Read. Applaud’ Jarvis Cocker

    ‘Utterly original. Jaw-dropping. The sort of book you’ll think about for ages’ Paula Hawkins, author of Girl on the Train

    ‘Another McGregor novel that, beneath its serene surface, takes huge risks … Fortunately, it’s also another McGregor novel that triumphantly gets away with it’ The Times

    ‘Lean Fall Stand is a beautiful piece of work and should win a roomful of prizes. Jon McGregor writes plainly and exactly, like a poet, and the precision of his writing makes every heartbeat register‘ Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light

    ‘A spectacular book … It does what Jon McGregor does so well: examine the widening ripples of a single event. I read it again, as soon as I’d finished’
    Maggie O’Farrell, author of Hamnet

    ‘Opens as excitingly as any work of fiction I’ve recently read … It’s extraordinarily tense and atmospheric – and McGregor’s prose is tight as a wire’ Telegraph

    ‘Exceptional. … So moving, and the use of language is remarkable. I absolutely loved it’ David Nicholls, author of Sweet Sorrow

    ‘A genuinely fascinating book and a troubling, riveting reading experience. A bold and masterful investigation into the weather system of the human mind’ Max Porter, author of The Death of Francis Bacon

    ‘A genuine masterpiece: poised, multilayered and full of the most astonishingly beautiful prose’ Alex Preston, Observer

    ‘McGregor’s precise, well-judged prose attests to both the power of language and to the havoc created by its loss’ Financial Times

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