Published: 07/02/2013
ISBN: 9781847085832
Granta Books
400 pages

Gob’s Grief

Chris Adrian

In the summer of 1863, Gob and Tomo Woodhull, eleven-year-old twins, agree to forsake their home and family for the glories of the Union Army. But on the night of their departure, Gob suffers a change of heart, and Tomo leaves his brother behind. When Tomo is shot clean through the eye in his very first battle, Gob is left to endure the guilt and grief that will later come to fuel his obsession with building a vast machine that will bring Tomo – indeed, all the Civil War dead – back to life.

A rich concoction of genres and parts, a profound, life-giving elixir, the very stuff of the imagination itself... [It has a] shocking power... Weird vignette follows bravura passage follows profound musing, in what amounts not so much to a novel as a sheer outpouring of writing, an overflow of history, fantasy and fiction

Ian Sansom, Guardian

Adrian's portrait of a nation gone mad with grief is splendid, ambitious and often heartbreaking

Kate Saunders, The Times

Remarkable... utterly different. A work unlike any that has come before it

Economist

The Author

Selected by the New Yorker as one of the ’20 Under 40′, Chris Adrian is the author of Gob’s Grief, The Children’s Hospital, A Better Angel and The Great Night. He is a Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist at Columbia University.

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