Liebe Fans der englischsprachigen Literatur,
heute haben wir etwas ganz Besonderes für euch: Der Verlag Pan Macmillan, eines der größten britischen Verlagshäuser, bietet drei Print-Leseexemplare des neuen Spitzentitels von James Hynes an, »Sparrow«, der im Original Anfang Mai erscheinen wird.
Eine deutsche Übersetzung ist noch nicht angekündigt. Somit habt ihr die Chance, in Deutschland zu den Ersten zu gehören, die dieses Buch im Original lesen dürfen.
Füllt dafür einfach das unten stehende Formular aus. Die glücklichen Erstleser*innen werden per Los bestimmt.
Der Lektor des Romans, Ravi Mirchandani, schreibt über seine Erfahrung mit diesem Buch Folgendes:
Dear Bookseller,
Some novels take their time to reveal themselves and their pleasures; others grab the reader from the first page. I hope you may find that the novel that you hold in your hands, James Hynes’s Sparrow, is one of the latter.
As he begins to tell the story of his childhood in Roman Spain in the 4th century CE, our narrator introduces himself:
‘I, Jacob, son of no one, father of no one, beloved of no one, a slave, a whore, a cinaedus, a eunuch, a murderer, a pimp, possibly a Jew, possibly a Syrian, possibly the silt of the Nile, a laborer, an overseer, a cripple, a consumptive, an abandoned piece of property, a weathered piece of driftwood discarded by a receding tide, the sole remaining resident of a deserted town in an abandoned province at the bleeding edge of a dying empire, set down this history of my life. It will never be finished, for who will write my ending?’
As we come to know him and his story, we may realise that Jacob is a distant cousin of Jack in Emma Donoghue’s Room – a boy raised by women, the only men he knows often violent visitors to his isolated world – and of Hanya Yanagihara’s Jude St Francis in A Little Life – he knows neither his birth name, parentage nor ancestry. He is a child without a clear sense of self, yet his story is as arresting as theirs.
Raised as a slave in a brothel, he has neither identity nor agency. Yet when his adoptive mother tells him a legend of the origins of the birds, how the sparrow can neither walk as well as the chicken, nor fly as well as the swift, he comes to identify with this humblest of birds, even while he can only dream of freedom. And yet, one day even the sparrow may fly …
Hynes tells Jacob’s story in an ancient Roman world utterly different from that of Graves’s I, Claudius and as brilliantly realised as Hilary Mantel’s Tudor England; and of a childhood as harrowing and moving as Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain. I found Sparrow arresting, gripping and deeply affecting. I hope you may too.
Should you love this book as I do, I would be delighted indeed to hear from you. With all good wishes,
Ravi Mirchandani
Editor-In-Chief
Picador
Raised in a brothel at the edge of a dying empire, a boy of no known origin creates his own identity. He is Sparrow, who sings without reason and can fly from trouble. His world is a kitchen, a herb-scented garden, a loud and dangerous tavern, and the mysterious upstairs where the ‘wolves’ – prostitutes and slaves from every corner of the empire – conduct their business.
He spends his days listening to stories told by his beloved ‘mother’ Euterpe, running errands for her lover the cook, and dodging the blows of their brutal overseer and the machinations of the chief wolf, Melpomene. A hard fate awaits Sparrow, one that involves suffering, murder, mayhem, and the scattering of the women who have been his whole world.
Through meticulous research and bold imagination, James Hynes brings the entirety of the Roman city of Carthago Nova – its markets, temples, taverns of the lowly and mansions of the rich – to vivid, brutal life. Walking through lost places, hearing forgotten voices, this story belongs to the slave class that made an infamous empire function. This is one of the most powerfully affecting and memorable characters of recent fiction. This is Sparrow.
Über den Autor
James Hynes is the author of Next, Kings of Infinite Space, The Lecturer’s Tale, Publish and Perish, and The Wild Colonial Boy. He lives in Austin, Texas.
James Hynes
Sparrow
464 Seiten
Picador UK
ISBN 978-1-5290-9239-4
Erscheint am 04.05.2023
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