Alison MacLeod. (2017). All the Beloved Ghosts. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Alison MacLeod. 2017. All the Beloved Ghosts. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Alison MacLeod, All the Beloved Ghosts. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

Alison MacLeod. All the Beloved Ghosts. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.

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   • bioText: Alison MacLeod is the author of three novels – The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013 – and two story collections. She is the joint winner of the Eccles British Library Writer's Award 2016 and was a finalist for the 2017 Governor General's Award. She was Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester until 2018, when she became Visiting Professor to write full-time. She lives in Brighton.
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2017-04-18T00:00:00-04:00

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title

All the Beloved Ghosts

fullDescription

An acutely observed, evocative collection of short stories blending fiction, biography, and memoir—from a Booker-longlisted author.

Evocative, sensual, and tender, these stories confront our reality culture and interrogate our relationship with iconic figures, coming to life at the boundary between reality and fiction.
A woman emerging from mourning spends her savings on a fur coat, a coat she will wear to a dance that will change her life. A professor of cardiovascular physiology lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he waits for his new heart to be delivered, still beating, from another body—and is carried on a tidal wave of memories to an attic room half a century ago. Visiting Sylvia Plath's grave in Yorkshire, the author imagines a conversation with the poet, a fellow North American who settled in grey England. She reflects on the treasured photograph of Princess Diana she took as a teenager, one of a multitude taken during a life cut short. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury group, is overpowered by echoes of the past; by all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes.
MacLeod's characters hover on the border of life and death, where memory is most vivid and the present most elusive. Moving from the London riots of 2011 to 1920s Nova Scotia, from Oscar Wilde's grave to the Brighton Pier, these exquisitely formed stories capture the small tragedies and profound truths of existence.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Publishers Weekly
   • content: MacLeod's collection of stories deftly blends fiction and facts, memory and biography, to delve into the precarious nature of human life. . . . Finely layered and often teasingly opaque, MacLeod's captivating book of stories presents a diverse array of voices, each as particular as the last.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Review of Books
   • content: Through nuanced and often lyrical prose, MacLeod imbues cultural figures and events with color and emotional authenticity. Even rumors are swaddled in a luminous believability until they are beyond doubt.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Paste, "30 Best Books of 2017 (So Far)"
   • content: Alison MacLeod blends memoir and fiction to stunning effect . . . The collection's haunting prose is by turns heartbreaking and uplifting, transforming the stories' heavy themes into something entirely unique.
4. • premium: False
   • source: Times Literary Supplement on THE WAVE THEORY OF ANGELS
   • content: [MacLeod] has an engaged delight in the stuff of life.
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Guardian on FIFTEEN MODERN TALES OF ATTRACTION
   • content: There's a giddying range of things to think about in MacLeod's collection of short stories, which range from gleeful comedy to aching tragedy . . . As formally inventive as it is original in its subject matter.
6. • premium: False
   • source: Metro on FIFTEEN MODERN TALES OF ATTRACTION
   • content: MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised and unified in awareness of the dark menace of love's uncertainty.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Time Out on FIFTEEN MODERN TALES OF ATTRACTION
   • content: A baker's dozen of excellence book-ended by brilliance. . . An eruption of ideas and linguistic flair that corrals the uncontainable and unpoliceable vagaries of human desire, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction is a potent and heady mix . . .The whole is ably piloted by MacLeod's total and impressive control of her material. Highly recommended.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Independent on UNEXPLODED
   • content: Like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile . . . a novel of staggering elegance and beauty.
9. • premium: False
   • source: The Guardian on UNEXPLODED
   • content: MacLeod remains one of the most astute chaoticians writing today.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Observer on UNEXPLODED
    • content: Full of simmering tension, resentment and unexpressed passion. A bold, cleverly-told story from a writer who knows exactly what she's doing.
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      February 20, 2017
      MacLeod’s (Unexploded) collection of stories deftly blends fiction and facts, memory and biography, to delve into the precarious nature of human life. The ghosts here are not literal—except, perhaps, in the mind of one elderly character from the title story and one brief appearance by the late Sylvia Plath. Instead, the visitations of supernatural and fantastic beings in MacLeod’s hands are suggestive of haunting memories and the traces that harrowing experiences leave behind. In “The Thaw,” a girl attends a town dance and on that night of horrific tragedy, has the time of her life. In “The Heart of Denis Noble” a cardiovascular surgeon prepping for heart surgery has flashbacks to his younger days, his first breakthrough research on heart conditions, and the hard lessons he has learned about the vagaries of love. In “There Are Precious Things” the lives of people traveling in a subway car—a single mother worried about her job, a nun on leave to get a hearing aid, a man with Alzheimer’s, among others—are examined. In “Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames,” the short life and widely controversial death of Princess Diana are revisited by a fan. Finely layered and often teasingly opaque, MacLeod’s captivating book of stories presents a diverse array of voices, each as particular as the last.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 15, 2017
      MacLeod, who was born in Montreal and lives in Britain, merges fact and fiction in her new collection of short stories, her first book to be published in the U.S. since her debut novel, The Changeling (1996).Wide-ranging and haunting, this collection seamlessly blends memoir, biography, and imagination to create narratives that explore the edges of reality and the ghosts that exist there. Death looms large, either as a threat or a perspective through which the characters view the nature of time. The opening story, "The Thaw," outlines the final day of a young Canadian woman's life and the legacy of grief she becomes part of when she dies unexpectedly. In "Sylvia Wears Pink in the Underworld" and "Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames," the losses of celebrities are examined through the lens of the author's own connection to Sylvia Plath and Princess Diana, two women turned into public spectacles and pop-culture icons. The title story, about Angelica Garnett, and "Oscillate Wildly" are moving looks back at lives near their end, while "The Heart of Denis Noble" melds science and passion as a man receives a new heart. Two of the collection's standout stories are "There are precious things" and "In Praise of Radical Fish." The former is a character study of the passengers on an Underground train, all of whom connect and react to one another over the course of a brief ride that highlights the humanity in a crowd. The latter is a funny and tense look at three would-be jihadis on a day at Brighton, where their fears and doubts about an upcoming mission come to the surface. All these stories are written in striking prose that seamlessly blends the real with the fictive, tapping into the unknown with compassion and genuine human emotion. A uniquely cohesive collection of short examinations of aging, death, and living, these stories are subtly moving and thoroughly engaging.

      COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 1, 2017
      A problem can occur in a reader's consciousness while proceeding through a collection of stories by the same author. Given that all the stories spring from the same sensibilities, style, and practiced subject matter, a sense of sameness can arise; not really a feeling of redundancy but one of a familiarity that may or may not feel comfortable, depending on the reader's sensitivity to repetition. No reader needs to worry about Booker long-lister MacLeod's (Unexploded, 2013) brilliant gathering of short fiction. Two examples demonstrate its rich variety. The Thaw is somewhat unusual for short fiction in that it is set in the past1926, to be exact. And how artfully MacLeod establishes that fact by referring to one character's new 1926 Buick Roadster as she tells a stunning family story that has become a local legend as an indication of the past's more rigid social mores. In Praise of Radical Fish offers a topical situation involving young men in England gathering for a pre-jihad team-building weekend. A thread of humor slyly works its way through this pointed tale, not for the purpose of mockery or spoof but rather to underscore that many serious engagements in life have an element of farce.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

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An acutely observed, evocative collection of short stories blending fiction, biography, and memoir—from a Booker-longlisted author.

Evocative, sensual, and tender, these stories confront our reality culture and interrogate our relationship with iconic figures, coming to life at the boundary between reality and fiction.
A woman emerging from mourning spends her savings on a fur coat, a coat she will wear to a dance that will change her life. A professor of cardiovascular physiology lingers on the cusp of consciousness as he waits for his new heart to be delivered, still beating, from another body—and is carried on a tidal wave of memories to an attic room half a century ago. Visiting Sylvia Plath's grave in Yorkshire, the author imagines a conversation with the poet, a fellow North American who settled in grey England. She reflects on the treasured photograph of Princess Diana she took as a teenager, one of a multitude taken during a life cut...

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