- Published: 07/03/2013
- ISBN: 9781847086914
- 129x20mm
- 192 pages
Leaving the Atocha Station
Ben Lerner
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his attitude towards art. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, Adam’s ‘research’ soon becomes a meditation on the possibility of authenticity, as he finds himself increasingly troubled by the uncrossable distance between himself and the world around him. It’s not just his imperfect grasp of Spanish, but the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, and his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry.
£8.99
Gales of laughter howl through [this] remarkable first novel. It's packed full of gags and page-long one-liners... intensely and unusually brilliant
Geoff Dyer, Observer
[This book] stood out from everything else I read this year
Catherine O’Flynn, Books of the Year, Observer
The best new novel I've read for a long time
James Meek
From the Same Author
Ben Lerner on Granta.com
Fiction | Granta 148
The Spread
Ben Lerner
‘He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him.’
Read an extract from Ben Lerner’s latest novel, The Topeka School.