A Walker in the Evening - Couverture souple

Owchar, Nick

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798991786300

Editeur : Ruby Violet-Publishers, an imprint of Samson Holdings LLC, 2024

Synopsis

ADVANCE PRAISE for former LA Times columnist Nick Owchar's debut novel A Walker in the Evening-

KIRKUS REVIEWS
A former priest confronts his demons in this intimate gothic tale.
Owchar’s debut novel opens in 1909 in Galicia, a rural Ukrainian province that adheres to various superstitions, one of which holds that, every night, a different person conducts a walk through the town carrying a “totem” that’s supposed to ward off any troubling spirits. On duty this night is the narrator, Yuri, who grew up in the region but then took a lengthy detour to England—where, anglicizing his name to George Frost, he entered the Catholic priesthood. Gifted at homiletics in divinity school, he won a prized assignment to a church in London, where his provocative sermons caught the attention of not just parishioners but a prominent theater critic. As word spread around his gift for oratory, he entered the inner circle of poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti and poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. This experience charmed the artistic-minded George, but proved a mixed blessing: Drawn into a web of marital tension, spiritualists, and illness, he was soon psychically over his head and tempted to abandon his vows. Owchar’s setup is ambitious, and at times the prose and plotting are overly clotted, but he nicely braids the rustic, folkloric nature of the Galician community with the high-toned London Catholic one, and his depictions of poetic wits and salt-of-the-earth farmers are equally graceful. He conjures a slowly intensifying mood of despair, as George/Yuri reveals more about the history, losses, and behavior that drew him away from London. The sermon that caught the hip London crowd suggested that the world is overrun with demons and that God’s intervention is unlikely; Ochwar evokes the sadness, verging on panic, that such a perspective provokes. A canny and ambitious cross-continental tale of apostolic anxiety.

“Nick Owchar gives us an absorbing novel about how we struggle to come to terms with past mistakes and often don’t. This is a well-told tale combining an English gothic story with glimpses of life in a Ukrainian village that is worth the time of all readers who enjoy such stories.”
—Philippa Gregory, author of The Other Boleyn Girl, The White Queen, and other novels

“A tale of supernatural menace and mysterious destiny set in 19th-century London and Eastern Europe and featuring a cast of darkly sinister and memorable characters ... Nick Owchar’s clever narration is captivating and often surprising, and his tale is certain to raise a chill in the reader now and again!”
—Richard Zimler, author of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon and The Incandescent Threads

~ ~ ~

Austria-Hungary, 1909. From the moment Yuri Moroz sets out on an evening patrol of
the Ukrainian village where he lives, he’s plunged into memories of the eerie
circumstances that forced him to flee London and the priesthood to seek safety far from home.
Eugenie, his wife, is having bad dreams and worries that he’s restless and misses his old life.
That couldn’t be farther from the truth, but his protests have failed to convince her. Now,
as he walks the village’s dusty lanes ... Yuri recalls his early years as a
Catholic priest, his triumphs in the pulpit, a strange relic left for him by his father, his
encounters with artists, dandies, ghosts, and spiritualists, and a selfish act that led to
disaster ... [as] he struggles to figure out an explanation that will satisfy her by the time the sun rises—if
the strange perils waiting for him in the dark don’t get him first.

A page-turning gothic tale, A Walker in the Evening brings together the contrasting
worlds of 1880s literary London and a struggling Eastern European village in the life of one
unforgettable character.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Ruby Violet-Publishers, an imprint of Samson Holdings LLC
• Date d'édition: 2024
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798991786300
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 280
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Manufactured by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg