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Unfinished Business
- Author
- Michael Bracewell
- Narrator
- Gina Murray
- Publisher
- Orion
- Publish Date
- 19 January 2023
- Run Time
- 5 hours 7 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent.
Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?
Critics Review
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Unfinished Business is humane, intimate and affecting because it explores universal themes - ageing, marriage, friendship, mortality - and celebrates beauty
Financial Times
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The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn't published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback . . . The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel's climax stuns like a concussion - worse than that, because it's not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming
Guardian
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This sense of innocence and wanting is what gives this eerie novel its power to move and frighten . . . Bracewell excels at this kind of shocked satire, of London's continuing grand delusions
TLS
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I was won over by this quietly reflective gem of a novel about regret, ageing, and the memory of lost love
Independent
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I gave up on Proust to read this - there are similarities - and didn't regret it. Not for a moment
Geoff Dyer
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What a poignant, quietly devastating novel, a meditation of loss in all its flavours and pains of late middle age with a Prufrock for our times at its heart
Travis Elborough
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There is an elegance and mystery to Bracewell's writing as well as a sumptuous, slightly chilly delight in the sensuality and texture of things; clothes, food, drink, interiors. His prose evokes a world that is at once unknowable, beautiful and sad
Stuart Maconie
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Michael Bracewell's masterpiece was worth the wait. Awash with luxury and regret, suffused with the pent-up emotion of The Great Gatsby and the style of a post-modern dandy, Bracewell delivers something magical
Philip Hoare
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This elegaic, understated story of a man cut adrift in London, haunted by the reality of his own decaying body, is an essay in fracturing memory, a compassionate and tender tale of searching for a better life as time runs short
Philip Clark
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This book has the instantly recognisable feel of a minor classic. Melancholic, reflective, it quietly and elegantly asks the big questions: what is a life for, exactly? What does it all amount to? A devastating portrait of a once dazzling life fading to grey
Keiran Goddard
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Michael Bracewell is an extraordinary stylist who's able to summon whole eras with a few deft phrases. In Unfinished Business, his prose mastery of cultural codes and aesthetic textures is put to work on the most intimate kinds of hope and loss. As a novelist he dazzles, then breaks your heart, and I wish I knew how he pulls it off
Brian Dillon
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For me, Michael Bracewell, in edgy, elusive works, like Present Tense, Souvenir, and now Unfinished Business, has always been engaged in something very special. A spiritual adventure which embraces all things with huge curiosity, seems present throughout his work
Alan Warner
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Details
- Author
- Michael Bracewell
- Narrator
- Gina Murray
- Duration
- 5 hours 7 minutes
- Release Date
- 19 January 2023
- ISBN
- 9781399604420
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Orion
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: literary and general, Fiction: literary and general non-genre, Family life fiction / Stories about family
Synopsis
UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?
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