- Published: 02/06/2016
- ISBN: 9781783780860
- 127x20mm
- 272 pages
I’m Jack
Mark Blacklock
In this provocative novel Mark Blacklock portrays the true and complex history of John Humble, aka Wearside Jack, the Ripper Hoaxer, a timewaster and criminal, sympathetic and revolting, the man hidden by a wall of words, a fiction-spinner worthy of textual analysis. In this remarkable work, John Humble leads the reader into an allusive, elusive labyrinth of interpretations, simultaneously hoodwinking and revealing.
I’m Jack is a riveting novel about truth, lies, prison and shame. It is also a profound and furious love letter to Sunderland. It is a puzzle, a hoax, a multi-voice portrait and a virtuoso assemblage of textual elements. I’m Jack announces the arrival of a radically talented and innovative novelist.
£8.99
A gripping study in self-invention - and, ultimately, self-erasure
Tom McCarthy
Here are dark telegrams from an expertly realised otherness that is Sunderland. Spare. Swift. Smart. And dangerous. Carrying us through maps of shame to rescue a convincing fiction of the past from its sullen entropy
Iain Sinclair
The varied range and wit of his polyphonic chorus are reminiscent of Joe Orton's darkly subversive correspondence pranks... [An] intelligent [and] disturbing slice of noir
Catherine Taylor, Guardian
From the Same Author
Hinton
Mark Blacklock
Howard Hinton and his family are living in Japan, escaping from a scandal. Hinton’s obsession is his work, his voyages into mathematical pure space, into the fourth dimension, but also his wife and sons, each of whom are entangled in the strange and unknown landscapes of Hinton’s science fictions.
In a bravura and startling meeting of real and philosophical elements, Mark Blacklock has created a ravishing period piece of late-Victorian social, scientific and domestic life. Hinton is about extraordinary discoveries, and terrible choices. It is about people who discover and map other realms, and what the implications might be for those of us left behind.
Mark Blacklock on Granta.com
Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition
The Paternoster: A Requiem
Mark Blacklock
‘To step into a paternoster lift is to step into the circulatory system of a building, to become a part of its very structure.’
Fiction | Granta Books
Line A—B
Mark Blacklock
‘Never was a man so deep in thought.’
An extract from Mark Blacklock’s new novel.
