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This Is Not a Novel

On sale

7th July 2003

Price: £9.99

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Selected: Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780747269465

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‘With masterful control, Johnston excavates a well of memory and hurt, quietly demonstrating the damage that can be done by families’ The Times

A beautifully crafted Irish novel of loss and yearning…

Johnny, an outstanding young swimmer, went missing nearly thirty years ago: drowned, or so everyone except his sister Imogen believes. How could this have happened?

Encouraged and pushed as a child by his father, Johnny could have made the Olympic team, couldn’t he? As Imogen gradually pieces together bits of her family history, we hear the tragic echoes that connect her with the Great War and Ireland in the nineteen-twenties.

‘Subtle, moving and beautifully constructed’ The Sunday Times

What readers say about THIS IS NOT A NOVEL:

‘A beautiful novel’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

‘This is a story told in layers. Like so many other Irish writers the distinctiveness of the place of their birth is never far from the surface’ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Reviews

Guardian
The quiet, elegiac prose is well sustained
Saturday Telegraph
Characters damaged by their upbringing are Jennifer Johnston's metier, and echoes are a favourite motif. In what is, despite its title, a very fine novel, the tragedies of her family's past recur as Imogen's words resound off the coastal bay. A taut narrative, pared prose and lyrical imagery add up to a sad affirmation of Philip Larkin's adage
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
Characteristically wry [and] intelligent