Hourglass: A 'beautiful, funny, profound' (New Statesman) debut novel about love and loss

Keiran Goddard

März 2022 · Hachette UK

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A short, exquisite novel about love, loss and making sense of the world - as heartbreakingly moving as it is outrageous and funny

'A universal love story' Guardian

'Beautiful, funny, profound ... read it in one glowing session' New Statesman

'A book for anyone who ever has been or ever will be heartbroken. So that's everyone.' Hollie McNish

Love builds up little by little and that's why it makes people reach for words like root and sediment and other words to do with rocks and trees. But what about the dismantling? Does it happen that way too? Because it feels like it is happening much, much faster. And I am reaching for words like landslide and like wave and like storm ...

Exquisitely crafted, wildly imaginative and as darkly funny as it is moving, Hourglass is a revolutionary love story. It turns time upside down, combs the intimate wreckage of heartbreak for something universal, and asks what it means to lose what you love.

Bewertungen und Rezensionen

An hourglass is an interesting piece to tell you the time. You can see how much time has passed and how much time is left. The past, the present and the future are shown at the same moment. Yet, you cannot know if the amount of sand that is still in the upper part will actually be there for you, maybe the hourglass is turned before it runs out and thus, the past comes back. The hourglass is concrete, on the one hand; on the other, it is the incorporation of time itself, never-ending and thus, volatile. For humans, life is a race against the clock. The sand is slowly tripping and just by looking in the mirror, we can see that another day, another week, another year has passed without us noticing. In Kieran Goddard’s debut novel “Hourglass”, a man is pondering about love. The whole novel is a stream of consciousness addressed to the man he loved in the past and whom he will love forever. They only had a brief time together and their love has no future. It is like sand, that cannot be stopped from falling from one glass into the other, it is just running through the narrator’s fingers. He can feel it and yet not stop it from vanishing. There is not real plot, it is a meditation on life, a yearning for love, the longing for bonding with other people which never works. A dense and focussed narration just like looking through a keyhole and observing an extract of life. Despite the poetic language and strong dark emotion, the novel did not really touch me. Maybe it was the lack of actual plot that I missed, somehow the text seems to be more like an extended poem rather than a novella.

Autoren-Profil

Keiran Goddard grew up in Shard End, Birmingham in a working-class family. He is the author of one poetry pamphlet, two poetry collections and the novel Hourglass. His debut collection was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Prize, he was the runner up in the William Blake Prize and Hourglass was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize. He speaks internationally on issues related to social change and currently develops research on workers' rights, the future of work, automation and trade unionism.