Listen free for 30 days
Listen with offer
-
Vulgar Things
- Narrated by: Colin Mace
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
99p for the first 3 months
Vulgar Things
Buy Now for £13.00
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
Summary
The second novel from Lee Rourke, author of the cult hit The Canal.
Jon Michaels - a divorced, disaffected and fatigued editor living a nondescript life in North London - wakes one morning to a phone call informing him that his uncle has been found dead in his caravan on Canvey Island. Dismissed from his job only the day before and hung-over, Jon reluctantly agrees to sort through his uncle's belongings and clear out the caravan. What follows is a quixotic week on Canvey as Jon, led on by desire and delusion, purposeful but increasingly disorientated, unfolds a disturbing secret, ever more enchanted by the island - its landscape and its atmosphere.
Haunted and haunting, Vulgar Things is part mystery, part romance, part odyssey: a novel in which the menial entrances and the banal compels.
Critic reviews
"Sad, lost men looking for maps in the starry Essex sky, small-town strippers, absent mothers, angry brothers, planets photographed on smart phones, cider and a lot of rare steak - Rourke is on his way to becoming the J. G. Ballard of Southend-on-Sea." (Deborah Levy)
"The poetry of estuary landscapes - muddy creeks, silhouettes of refineries, the slow passage of giant container ships, the flat horizon - shines through Lee Rourke's prose with a black luminescence." (Tom McCarthy)
"As poignant and unsettling as a beam of light hitting the night sky from across the far-off wastes." (Eimear McBride)
"A consistently disturbing yet compelling vision of loss, violence and identity, Vulgar Things stalks the reader's memory long after the last page. A novel of innovation and resonance, it is as bleak and as beautiful as a deserted coastline." (Stuart Evers)