A Closed Book

by Gilbert Adair (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1999

  $4.16

  After losing his eyes and half of his face in a car accident, a famous author advertises for an assistant to communicate the visual world to him. The amiable John Ryder seems to be the answer to his prayers - but there is an old axiom: be careful of what you wish for, or you might just get it.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.29

  An isolated cottage deep in the heart of the Cotswolds. A writer's den, as dusty, gloomy and full of exotic objets d'art as the cell of a medieval monk. Two men sit opposite each other, one of them talking, the other typing. But why, in such already sombre surroundings, does one of the two men wear thick dark glasses? What is the other typing so industriously and so apparently imperturbably? Why is the light left on in an unoccupied bathroom? What is the precise significance of the jigsaw puzzle laid out on the study table? Why, too, are some of its pieces missing? Whose statue actually stands on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square? Who or what, above all, is causing an unearthly shadow to fall across these two inextricably interwoven destinies? With an atmosphere of eerie morbidity reminiscent of Poe, Hoffmann and even Stephen King, and an eleventh-hour double whammy of a twist of which Agatha Christie herself would have been envious, Gilbert Adair's novel, one which - for a reason it would be unpardonable to divulge in advance - the reader hears rather than reads, is one of his most brilliant.