 First edition | |
| Author | John David Morley |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction, Historical, Picaresque, Philosophical |
| Publisher | Max Press |
Publication date | 2007 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 393 pp |
| ISBN | 0-297-84848-8 |
Passage (2007) is a historical novel by John David Morley, the story of one man's journey through five centuries of existence in the New World.
 | This article needs an improved plot summary.(November 2015) |
Abducted by conquistadors in the year 1500, the merchant's ward Pablito (alias White Water Bird, alias Paul Zarraté, alias Paul Straight, alias "the World’s Greatest Living Wonder") [1] passes through five books and five ages of man, as he travels from the primordial forests of the Amazon to the Incan empire of Tahuantin-Suyu, to the slave-plantations of colonial Pernambuco, via antebellum New Orleans, to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, before witnessing the birth of Hollywood and the explosion of an atomic bomb.
"The testimony of this decelerated man makes for a long, luxuriantly detailed read," Charles Fernyhough noted in The Sunday Telegraph . [2] "This sweeping but pacey 'palimpsest' of a novel wraps up the past of an entire hemisphere in one mesmerising voice," declared Boyd Tonkin in The Independent . [3] “Funny, depressing, optimistic, bleak, fantastic, mundane: John David Morley's remarkable new novel is all of these, often in the space of a single paragraph,” wrote James Porteous in The Herald: "Morley's themes of time, memory, sleep, death, religion, myth and longevity evoke Borges and Marquez and their mixture of magic and mundane. At its best, the book bears comparison with those masters." [4] The critic Frank Kermode hailed Passage as "a remarkable feat of imagination and sheer narrative energy, the apotheosis of the picaro." [5]
In 2011, Passage was published in Spanish as La Noche Será Larga [6] in a translation by Claudia Conde.
The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a prestigious literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the first novel by British author Alan Sillitoe and won the Author's Club First Novel Award.
William Andrew Murray Boyd is a Scottish novelist, short story writer and screenwriter.
Nicola Barker is an English novelist and short story writer.
Ian Fleming Publications is the production company formerly known as both Glidrose Productions Limited and Glidrose Publications Limited, named after its founders John Gliddon and Norman Rose. In 1952, author Ian Fleming bought it after completing his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale; he assigned most of his rights in Casino Royale, and the works which followed it to Glidrose.
Simon Andrew Hicks Mayo is an English radio presenter and author who worked for BBC Radio from 1982 until 2022.
Sebastian Charles Faulks is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray.
Sinéad Moira Cusack is an Irish actress. Her first acting roles were at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, before moving to London in 1969 to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has won the Critics' Circle and Evening Standard Awards for her performance in Sebastian Barry's Our Lady of Sligo.
The Glasgow Guardian is the student newspaper of the University of Glasgow.
Rupert Thomson, FRSL is an English writer. He is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels and an award-winning memoir. He has lived in many cities around the world, including Athens, Berlin, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and Rome. In 2010, after several years in Barcelona, he moved back to London. He has contributed to the Financial Times, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Granta and the Independent.
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990–2015) was a British literary award. It was inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent to honour contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom. The award was first launched in 1990 and ran for five years before falling into abeyance. It was revived in 2001 with the financial support of Arts Council England. Beginning in 2011 the administration of the prize was taken over by BookTrust, but retaining the "Independent" in the name. In 2015, the award was disbanded in a "reconfiguration" in which it was merged with the Man Booker International Prize.
The Australian Literature Society Gold Medal is awarded annually by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature for "an outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year." From 1928 to 1974 it was awarded by the Australian Literature Society, then from 1983 by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, when the two organisations were merged.
Jennifer Elizabeth Wilkie Erdal, néeCrawford; first married name Bradshaw, known as Jennie Erdal was a Scottish writer. She was the author of Ghosting, a memoir of her childhood in a Fife mining village and of being the long-serving ghostwriter of Naim Attallah, the publisher and owner of Quartet Books.
David Morley is a British writer and radio producer.
The Lost Man Booker Prize was a special edition of the Man Booker Prize awarded by a public vote in 2010 to a novel from 1970 as the books published in 1970 were not eligible for the Man Booker Prize due to a rules alteration; until 1970 the prize was awarded to books published in the previous year, while from 1971 onwards it was awarded to books published the same year as the award. The prize was won by J. G. Farrell for Troubles.
John David Victor Morley was an English writer and novelist.
Garry O'Connor is an English playwright, biographer and novelist.
The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel written by British author Julian Barnes. The book is Barnes's eleventh novel written under his own name and was released on 4 August 2011 in the United Kingdom. The Sense of an Ending is narrated by a retired man named Tony Webster, who recalls how he and his clique met Adrian Finn at school and vowed to remain friends for life. When the past catches up with Tony, he reflects on the paths he and his friends have taken. In October 2011, The Sense of an Ending was awarded the Booker Prize. The following month it was nominated in the novels category at the Costa Book Awards.
Solo is a James Bond continuation novel written by William Boyd. It was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape on 26 September 2013 in hardback, e-book and audio editions, and in the US by HarperCollins on 8 October 2013.
Boyd Tonkin Hon. FRSL is an English writer, journalist and literary critic. He was the literary editor of The Independent newspaper from 1996 to 2013. A long-time proponent of foreign-language literature, he is the author of The 100 Best Novels in Translation (2018). He has been involved with leading literary prizes such as the Man Booker International Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. In 2020 Tonkin was the recipient of the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature.