The first novel by Chris Power (Mothers) is an exhilarating literary thriller about the nature of fiction itself. A Lonely Man follows an author who must confront the dangers of inhabiting another person's story.
Robert Prowe is a British writer living in Berlin with his wife and two daughters. With a book of stories published years earlier and his first novel long overdue, his career seems to be at a standstill. But then he encounters an intriguing stranger, who confides in him a dangerous secret: Patrick, a ghostwriter, claims to have been employed by Sergei Vanyashin, an exiled Russian dissident, to write a book exposing the crimes of the Russian oligarchy. Now Vanyashin is dead--his death dubiously ruled a suicide--and Patrick believes the assassins will soon come for him. Sensing a way out of his creative rut, Robert takes Patrick's incredible story and shapes it as his own.
With a deft and subtle hand, Power structures his novel in such a way as to draw out the kind of tantalizing ambiguity that only precise writing can produce. His protagonist sees "life not as a vast sprawl, but a series of stacked realities"; Power reflects this view by nesting one man's account within another, raising questions of reliability that reverberate through multiple layers of narration. These questions gather into an atmosphere of uncertainty, lending Power's metafiction a charge of suspense. Exploring the shifting borders of fiction and reality, A Lonely Man locates peril in the disputed territory between the two. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books, Seattle, Wash.