Letters to Jude

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Unable to find emotional rapport with his wife, Lil, with whom he shares a childless marriage, middle-aged and ailing librarian Leo Lambkin begins a correspondence with an old flame, Bernarda, who writes to him from Seville after she hears of the tragic death of his mother. Bernarda, whom Leo disguises as Jude, informs him that he is the father of her child, Uanito, begot some years previously by violent circumstances. As dark wintry days give way to the increasing light and hope of summer, Leo and Jude long for an anticipated rendezvous. But what are the forces that stand in their way? 'If every word was once a poem, then what happened? We think that we are using language while, like the ground beneath us, all the time language may be using us. In Letters to Jude James Lawless takes us on a magical tour also a through the levels of language, in all its glory and its slipperiness. He has at once a heightened sense of the promises of language and a deep, nagging doubt about the limits to communicability. Such is his intrepid sophistication, that he can even bring himself to doubt the very medium through which those doubts are expressed. A tour-de-force for the mind but also a chastening that words come from the body and return to it'. Declan Kiberd ‘A rich Joycean novel with beautifully written passages of linguistic diversity and deep emotions full of insights.’ Brandon Yen