Montpelier Parade

by Karl Geary

Overview

“Geary enters the literary arena with a bang: this debut about an unconventional love affair between a teenage boy and an older woman is unassuming but gorgeously rendered.” —Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review

Montpelier Parade is just across town, but to Sonny it might as well be a different world. Working with his father in the garden of one of its handsome homes one Saturday, he sees a back door easing open and a beautiful woman coming down the path toward him. This is Vera, the sort of person who seems destined to remain forever out of his reach.

Hoping to cast off his loneliness and a restless sense of not belonging—at high school, in his part-time job at the butcher shop, and in the increasingly suffocating company of his own family—Sonny drifts into dreams of a different kind of life. A series of intoxicating encounters with Vera lead him to feel he has fallen in love for the first time, but why does her past seem as unknowable as her future?

Unfolding over a bright, rain-soaked Dublin spring, Montpelier Parade is a rich, devastating debut novel about desire, grief, ambition, art, and the choices we must make alone.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936787531
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	08/22/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	686 KB

About the Author

Karl Geary was born in Dublin, and moved to New York City at age sixteen. He co-founded two East Village institutions: the music venue Sin-é, and later the Scratcher. He has worked as a scriptwriter (Coney Island Baby) and an actor (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet; Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall), and has adapted and directed Dorothy Parker’s story “You Were Perfectly Fine” for the screen. He lives in Glasgow with his wife and daughter.
Karl Geary was born in Dublin, and moved to New York City at age 16. He co-founded two East Village institutions: the music venue Sin-é, and later the Scratcher. He has worked as a scriptwriter (Coney Island Baby) and an actor (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet; Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall), and has adapted and directed Dorothy Parker’s story “You Were Perfectly Fine” for the screen. He lives in Glasgow with his wife and daughter.

Read an Excerpt

Your body had warmed itself, and as you gathered the red bricks into a neat pile, the world was silent, laid out before you, slow and wide, punctuated by the occasional songbird and the wet scraping of your father’s shovel. “Who lives here?” you say. He stopped shoveling, and his breaths came quick as he leaned his hip against the shovel, searching the sky above, his gums showing. “Who lives here?” you say again. “The people who have a broken garden wall live here,” he says. “Do you want them for something?” “I do,” you say. “I want to buy the place and give us both a day off.” He smirked and that was lovely. He put a fresh cigarette to his mouth. A blue Bic lighter was in his hand. He sparked it, then shook it a few times, and it took. Gray smoke came out his nose. “It’d be some penny now, that house,” he says, looking over the three floors of pale sandstone, the perfect window panes. “But big and all as it is, you can only be in one room at a time.”

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/05/2017
Geary enters the literary arena with a bang: this debut about an unconventional love affair between a teenage boy and an older woman is unassuming but gorgeously rendered. Set in 1980s working-class Dublin and told in the second-person point of view, the quiet, sensitive story follows Sonny as he slogs from school to his part-time job at the butcher shop to home, where he’s the youngest of many brothers and his exhausted mother is cooking yet another meal while criticizing Sonny’s gambling father under her breath. Besides sneaking out to smoke cigarettes at a cluster of rocks called the Cat’s Den with his only acquaintance, a sexually promiscuous dropout named Sharon, Sonny spends most of his nonworking hours worrying about his mom, trying to placate his dad, stealing bike parts, getting drunk, and wandering along the canal at night—until he meets Vera, an educated, posh British woman who lives alone in the house he and his laborer father are repairing. From the moment he lays eyes on her, Sonny is smitten, and the affair that develops slowly over the course of the book is both deeply nuanced and utterly convincing. Geary has an ear for snappy dialogue, and the economic strains on Sonny’s family are keenly felt throughout the book. Above all, it’s the combination of Sonny’s unwitting innocence and Vera’s inescapable sadness that makes their connection—and the novel—brilliant and heartbreaking. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for MONTPELIER PARADE

“[An] accomplished debut. . . . The novel is narrated entirely in the second person, a stylistic choice that produces moments of intense intimacy”—The New Yorker

“Geary enters the literary arena with a bang: this debut about an unconventional love affair between a teenage boy and an older woman is unassuming but gorgeously rendered”—Publishers Weekly,starred and boxed review

“A relentlessly downbeat but often poignant novel about flawed and despairing lovers testing—and transgressing—border walls of various kinds”—Kirkus Reviews

“Fast paced and highly engrossing, Geary’s debut perfectly balances dreary romance with sharp teen angst”—Booklist

“One of the most quietly devastating Irish novels in recent memory”—Literary Hub, ""Literary Hub's Favorite Books of 2017""

“Montpelier Parade . . . presents us with the fraught experience of first love, told in beautifully doleful prose that sometimes exhibits Salinger–esque sparseness”—Zyzzyva

“Luminous and moving. A story that asks who you can love and how, and a novel that gets to the heart of things; it certainly got to the heart of me”—Sunjeev Sahota, Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Year of the Runaways

"A groundbreaking debut. Montpelier Parade is a taut, riveting, beautifully sparse coming of age tale from a fearless new talent."" — Téa Obreht, National Book Award Finalist & New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife

“Few novelist debut with a masterpiece, but Geary has done just that. Stunning”—Daily Mail

“Pitch–perfect”—The Guardian

“Geary is the latest player in a recent resurgence of Irish literary talent, which also includes Jess Kidd (Himself) and Lisa McInerney (The Glorious Heresies). In Montpelier Parade, he delivers an unforgettable love story in writing that is often exceptional . . . Geary captures time and place startlingly well . . . Montpelier Parade is reminiscent of Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel for a Knave — that 1960s classic of social realism — in its depiction of a youngster trapped by deprivation. But what is Geary’s, and Geary’s alone, is the desperately moving romantic entanglement at its heart”— Financial Times (UK)

“Geary — who has previously worked as an actor and scriptwriter — is a genuine talent. The sense of intimacy created by the second–person narrative is brilliantly sustained and the dialogue throughout is pitch perfect, seeming almost audibly to slice the always pregnant, often suffocatingly toxic atmosphere”—Daily Mail (UK)

“Geary's acute observations perfectly capture the essence of boyhood bewilderment and bravado . . . This is an unusually vivid novel that presents life how it is, rather than how Hollywood scriptwriters might like it to be”—Press Association (UK)

“Intensely powerful”—Sunday Mirror (UK)

“A class act, Montpelier Parade is an assured and moving debut from a writer confident in his voice and his unusual approach to storytelling”—Sunday Business Post (UK)

“A bittersweet love story. . . . Geary’s depiction of his home town is so visceral you can almost feel the dreich air seeping into your bones as you read. . . . Geary’s acute observations perfectly capture the essence of boyhood bewilderment and bravado. . . . An unusually vivid novel that present life how it is”—The Herald (UK)

“Luminous ... brilliantly paced, full of tension and tenderness”—Irish Times

“The work of a deft, fearless writer ... evoking the subtly dark comedy of Patrick McCabe, and the delicious lyricism of Peter Murphy, Geary has a keen recollection of the folly and hunger of youth. Add in a gut–spinning plot twist, and it's safe to describe Montpelier Parade as one of the first significant releases of 2017”—Irish Independent

“A class act...Montpelier Parade is an assured and moving debut from a writer confident in his voice and his unusual approach to storytelling”— Sunday Business Post (Ireland)

“Beautiful and tender ... a wonderful read whose tender story will stay with you long after turning the last page”— RTE (Ireland Public Radio)

“Captivating ... a luminous, moving story that is full of heart”—Image Magazine

“I adored this unconventional love story. It’s tender, with luminous language, and should catapult the author to literary fame”—Irish Examiner

“Intensely powerful”—Irish Sunday Mirror

From the Publisher

2017-06-06
The debut novel from screenwriter and actor Geary, set a generation ago in Dublin, depicts a dark, sad, doomed, and deeply unconventional love affair.Sonny Knolls is a working-class teenager who earns extra money as a dogsbody at a butcher's shop after school and on the weekend helps his father, a small-time handyman. On one such occasion, as father and son shore up a homeowner's wall in the tony area that gives the novel its title, Sonny encounters their employer, a middle-aged woman named Vera whose haunted, ethereal beauty—partly bound up in her seeming an alien from the far-off land of Posh and Prosperous—makes an immediate and indelible impression. Sonny begins to contrive ways to see her again, reasons to return to her trim and lovely house. His own neighborhood is grimy, his family life bleakly unpromising; Sonny's father is a crank and a gambler, his mother meek, resentful, but long-suffering; it's the sort of family in which communication, if one has to indulge in such, is guilt-ridden, stunted, laconic, furtive. Geary skillfully captures the milieu and establishes Sonny's hapless sense of where he's headed: blackout drinking, petty theft, expulsion from school, a meat-cutting apprenticeship he'll be lucky to keep, a life of grim hanging on. Vera, who has formidable troubles of her own with depression, is likewise drawn (there are hints of a precipitating mystery and shame here, but there's no way to put it together until the end) to the sensitive, vulnerable, good-looking teenager, and before long the tension between them explodes into an erotic clinch that, she tells him, he'll eventually hate her for. That Geary makes this romantic relationship feel genuine and even touching, as well as unsettling and a little creepy, is one of the book's several merits. A relentlessly downbeat but often poignant novel about flawed and despairing lovers testing—and transgressing—border walls of various kinds.

Kirkus Reviews