The Man Who Walks

The Man Who Walks

by Alan Warner (Author)

Synopsis

After the scandalous theft of a pub's World Cup cash kitty, a homeless drifter pursues his eccentric uncle: 'The Man Who Walks', north, up into the Highlands to recover the money - a cool GBP27,000. The nephew's frantic, stalled progress and other bizarre diversions form Warner's fourth, wickedly hilarious novel. But who is The Man Who Walks? Is he simply a water-carrying madman with one glass eye and a fondness for whisky and pony nuts, who collects old Christmas trees for money and old newspapers to make his home, and who has a physiological inability to handle slopes? Or is he a savant, touched by the hand of God, wandering the back roads along ancient, ancestral tracks? And as the sinister, unstable nephew gains on The Man Who Walks, and their paths begin to meet, can it be that it will all end in a field and that this field is Culloden Moor? Since his first novel, Morvern Callar, Warner's fictional world has become a deliciously familiar one: a Scotland at once real and surreal, patrolled by Hollywood productions, ex-British Rail trolley-girls, crazed snowboarders and a sybaritic aristocracy. His writing is savage but learned, shot through with deviant sexuality and demented humour but, at the heart of this fierce and strange world, there is huge human tenderness, moments of extraordinary lyrical beauty and a ranging, breathtaking imagination.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 304
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Published: 30 May 2002

ISBN 10: 0224051091
ISBN 13: 9780224051095
Book Overview: Published to coincide with the release of the film of Morvern Callar.

Media Reviews
The man's a genius - one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever Time Out Nobody takes literary and inventive risks that pay off quite like Warner's do - the book is an immense pleasure Guardian Warner is unique and treasurable Daily Telegraph A triumph of blackly comic modern gothic - Warner's a brilliant writer and his wild imagination is captured in prose of demented lyricism Big Issue The Man Who Walks confirms this Scot as one of the most unusual and provocative writers working this side of the Atlantic New Statesman
Author Bio
Alan Warner is the author of three previous novels: Morvern Callar, which has been filmed by Lynn Ramsay and will be released in early summer; These Demented Lands, which won the 1998 Encore Award, and The Sopranos, which is also to be filmed.