Grippingly atmospheric and chillingly eternal, an important new literary voice explores the effect of Europe's recent civil wars on the ordinary man.
One afternoon - in a certain European village, in the middle of a civil war - one man digs while another watches over him. Gradually, they begin to talk.
As the snow falls and truck-loads of villages are corralled in the next field, we discover why the two men are there - not just who they are and how specific, sinister events in their country have led them to be separated by a deepening grave, but why the history of civilisation is inseparable from the history of mass violence.
As the sky darkens and the temperature drops, 'Schopenhauer's Telescope' reaches its gripping, terrifying conclusion: that our most fixed certainties can disappear at the point of a gun.
Beautifully written, with a poet's eye for detail coupled to a chilling narrative drive, this book is current in the best sense - grounded in recent European history and attempting to make art out of brutal life.
