A Game with Sharpened Knives

by NeilBelton (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.36

  In 1939, the life of an Austrian physicist was saved by a revolutionary whose own sentence of execution had been commuted almost twenty years earlier. The physicist was Erwin Schrodinger, charismatic winner of the Nobel prize for Physics in 1931, forced to flee when the Nazis entered Austria; the revolutionary was the Irisch Fuhrer, Eamon de Valera. These are the extraordinary facts behind this extraordinary fiction. Murder is in the air, and on the sea beyond the mouth of the river Liffey. German bombs are dropping, accidentally it is reported, on Dublin. In 1941, Ireland is a country not truly at peace, either with Germany, or with its neighbour across the Irish sea, or in fact with itself. Erwin Schrodinger, bohemian intellectual and emotional enigma, is living in cramped exile in the village of Clontarf on the outskirts of Dublin, with his wife, his lover and their child. A Game with Sharpened Knives is the story of a man foundering on his own desires, a man who often finds it easier to say nothing, for no one in the tense and impoverished city of Dublin is quite what they appear. The first language of this country, as Erwin's Irish lover tells him, is silence.From the winner of the Irish Times prize, a first work of fiction, and a truly magnificent novel.

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $12.61

  'This is a text you will remember for years...austere, authoritative fiction, a fine and melancholy novel, its poignant insights shimmering' Hilary Mantel, Literary Review

  'Neil Belton's first novel is an improbable masterpiece. It is improbable because it requires the reader to imagine what it is like to be a scientific genius. It is a masterpiece because he pulls it off' EVENING STANDARD

  The reviews have been simply stunning for this debut novel set in Ireland in 1941. Nobel prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger was forced to flee Austria in 1933 after the Nazis invaded but was saved from disgrace and danger when the revolutionary Irish leader, Eamon de Valera, invited him to Ireland. The novel is set against the background of a country not truly at peace, either with Germany, or with its neighbour across the Irish Sea. Erwin Schrodinger, cosmopolitan intellectual and emotional enigma, is living in cramped exile on the outskirts of Dublin, with his wife, his lover, and their child. But in the pervading atmosphere of fear and distrust, Schrodinger lives a precarious existence, haunted by his past and by mysterious threats in the present.