Jeremy Gavron is the author of six books, including the novels The Book of Israel, winner of the Encore Award, and An Acre of Barren Ground; and A Woman on the Edge of Time, a memoir about his mother’s suicide. He lives in London, and teaches on the MFA at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
What happens when we lose the narrative of our own life, and fall into someone else's? Felix Culpais a work of extraordinary literary alchemy: a novel made out of lines taken from a hundred great works of literature. It follows a writer on the trail of a boy recently released from prison, who has been discovered dead in the cold north, frozen and alone. But in searching for the boy's story, will he lose his own?
Chosen as an Observer 'Book of the Year' by Ali Smith, Rachel Cooke and Jackie Kay In 1965, Hannah Gavron - a bright, sophisticated young writer and wife to a rising entrepreneur - gassed herself in Primrose Hill, north London. She left behind a suicide note, two small children, and an about-to-be-published manuscript: The Captive Wife. Jeremy Gavron was the youngest of Hannah's children, just four years old when she killed herself. In this searching examination of the events that led to her suicide, he pieces together - from letters, diaries and the memories of old friends - a picture of a brilliant but complex young woman grappling to find an outlet for her intelligence and sexuality as she carved out her place in a man's world.
By bringing out the comic and quotidian in 130 years of Jewish history, Jeremy Gavron paints a wonderfully fresh and convincing portrait of a dissipating identity.