A Curious Earth
  • Published: 1 May 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099490654
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $42.00

A Curious Earth

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A wonderfully warm, compassionate and poignant look at old age, new loves and family life by the Booker Prize shortlisted author and poet.

By the author of Booker-shortlisted I'll Go To Bed At Noon.

Aldous Jones is in a bad way: his dilapidated house is empty of family but full of hoarded odds and ends that remind him of his dead wife and son. A preference for whisky over washing rapidly leads to his hospitalisation but it also reawakens his desire for sex and adventure and his lifelong passion for art.

What follows is a heartbreakingly funny quest that will lead him first to the National Gallery, where he is bewitched by a Rembrandt painting, and then to Ostend, to stay with his boemian son and a ridiculous Dutch sexologist and then through a series of somewhat misguided relationships with sympathetic women to an ending of devatating poignancy...
  • Published: 1 May 2008
  • ISBN: 9780099490654
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $42.00
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About the author

Gerard Woodward

Gerard is the author of an acclaimed sequence of novels, August (shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award), I'll Go to Bed at Noon (shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize) and A Curious Earth. He was born in London in 1961, and published several prize-winning collections of poetry before turning to fiction. His latest collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians was shortlisted for the 2005 T.S.Eliot Prize. He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in Bath with his family.

Also by Gerard Woodward

Caravan Thieves
I'll Go To Bed At Noon
August
Island To Island
See all

Praise for A Curious Earth

Woodward's novels rise far above the ordinary. His characters are wonderfully complex and rich

Daily Telegraph

It is Woodward's special ability to extract even from these grim beginnings some grounds for hope, and , indeed, some comic potential

David Horspool, Times Literary Supplement

There are some wonderful set pieces, some needle sharp observations... and some delightful comic moments

Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times

This immediately convincing and captivating novel is full of wit and humour and joy

David Flusfeder, Financial Times

If this exquisitely written, funny, touching finale doesn't actually win something, then there's no justice

John Harding, Daily Mail

Quite brilliant ... the writing is scintillatingly good at times, working up to vivid and hilarious scenes ... a book that alerts you to the whole beautiful absurdity of life

Jonathan Gibbs, Metro

Assured and accomplished

Allan Massie, Scotsman

Above all an unsentimental tribute to family

Catherine Taylor, Independent on Sunday

Every now and then, you come across a book that is so intensely satisfying you want to buy a sack-load of copies and dole them out to strangers on the street, A Curious Earth is one....if only there were more writers of his calibre at work in Britain today

Alastair Sooke, Daily Telegraph

Though Woodward writes of family tragedy, his canvas is so busy with artfully drawn characters, telling incidents and the beautifully delineated ebb and flow of domestic life that the experience of reading him is richly involving, poignantly comic, and even somehow uplifting... his trilogy is a wonderful achievement

Justine Jordan, Guardian

Woodward wears his influences lightly, and tells this strange story about living and dying in a voice as beautiful and bright as it is learned

Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

A masterful portrait of old age and loneliness. I cannot praise it highly enough. If you haven't read the previous books, no matter - you will

Mail on Sunday

Woodward wonderfully depicts the ignominies of old age and bereavement

Independent