'A moving and direct study of frailty, love and time and luck and grief' Guardian Edvard Behrends is a diplomat, highly regarded for his work on international peace negotiations. Under his arbitration, unimaginable atrocities are coolly dissected; invisible lines, grown taut and frayed with conflict, redrawn. In his latest post, Edvard has been sent to a nondescript hotel in the Tyrol. High up on this mountain, the air is bright and clear. He confides in no one - no one but his wife Anna. Anna, who he loves with all his heart; Anna, always present and yet forever absent.
Tim Finch is a leading campaigner & writer on refugee and migrant issues and the author of one previous novel, The House of Journalists. His writing has been published in the The Times, Guardian and Spectator. He has broadcast frequently on the BBC, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and CNN. He formerly worked as a director of the leading think tank IPPR, was a director at the Refugee Council and worked as a senior political journalist at the BBC. He is the founder of two charities, Sponsor Refugees and Counterpoints Arts, and also founded the migration communications agency IMIX. He collaborated with the artist Ai Weiwei on his acclaimed 2017 documentary Human Flow. He lives in London.
Title: Peace Talks
Author: Finch, Tim
ISBN: 9781526611680
Binding:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication Date: 2021-04-01
Number of Pages: 224
Weight: 0.1600 kg
A tender and elegant portrait of a grieving individual searching for personal and political peace * Sunday Times *
Tim Finch's elegant and wintry novel has something of the feel of early Kazuo Ishiguro, and a similar acute grasp of both character and situation ... In Behrends, Finch has created a narrator both open and opaque * Observer *
There are war stories and there are love stories, but we only occasionally get war stories and love stories braided together ... A wonderful novel, tiny and epic both. Laced with humour and sadness, this is an intimate account of what it means to make peace -- Colum McCann
A shrewd delight * independent.co.uk *
A profound novel about human frailty ... In its tone and minor-key approach, Peace Talks is reminiscent of the Julian Barnes of Levels of Life, plus lashings of (duly credited) James Salter ... Peace Talks turns out to be a moving and direct study of frailty , love and time, and luck and grief , of what is left when all the noise - of machination, violence and competing stories - is stripped away * Guardian *
A feat of telling ... Masterfully rendered * Spectator *
As well as shining a light on the conflict resolution industry, Finch plays a canny game with our assumptions about the motives behind Anna's murder, in a smart tale slyly engineered to warn against the perils of nationalist tub-thumping * Daily Mail *
