With Death of an Ordinary Man, Glen Duncan continues his penetrating and innovative exploration of the supernatural with a novel that is far and away his most powerful and accomplished yet. Nathan Clark's gravestone offers a short and hopeful summary: At rest. But Nathan is not at rest, and knows he won't be until he finds out why he died. Privy now to the innermost thoughts and feelings of his family and friends — confessions that are raw, brutal, and unexpected — Nathan spends the day of his wake getting to know the living as he has never known them before: His father struggles with a legacy of family tragedy; his wife with the baggage of a doomed affair; his older daughter with her burgeoning sexuality and adolescent confusion. But why isn't Nathan's young daughter Lois at the wake? Who are the two strangers at the funeral, and why does their presence fill him with dread?
Part detective story, part family portrait, Death of an Ordinary Man is an unflinching look at the margins of human experience, where the boundaries of fundamental feelings — love, grief, desire, shame, and hope — meet and mingle, and no motivation is as simple as it seems.
Glen Duncan is a British author born in 1965 in Bolton, Lancashire, England to an Anglo-Indian family. He studied philosophy and literature at the universities of Lancaster and Exeter. In 1990 Duncan moved to London, where he worked as a bookseller for four years, writing in his spare time. In 1994 he visited India with his father (part roots odyssey, part research for a later work, The Bloodstone Papers) before continuing on to the United States, where he spent several months travelling the country by Amtrak train, writing much of what would become his first novel, Hope, published to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic in 1997. Duncan lives in London.
Recently, his 2002 novel I, Lucifer has had the film ... (more)
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