About the Book
On January 26, 1948, a public health official arrives at a branch of the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo. There has been an outbreak of dysentery in the neighborhood, he tells the manager, and he has been assigned by Occupation authorities to treat all locals who might have been exposed.
The sixteen members of the staff gather as the official pours the first of two separate medicines into sixteen cups and instructs them in how exactly to drink it. Within five minutes, ten employees are dead and the official has fled. But the horrific crime is merely the catalyst for this blistering novel.
In twelve different voices--each telling the story of the murder from a singular perspective--the narrative gathers staggering power and pathos. We hear one of the victims speak from the grave. We read the increasingly mad notes of one of the case detectives, the desperate letters of an American occupier, and the testimony of a traumatized survivor. We meet a journalist, a gangster-turned-businessman, a man who calls himself "The Occult Detective," a Soviet soldier, and a well-known painter accused and convicted of the crime. Every voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a people making their way out of a war-induced hell. Wittingly or unwittingly, each one of them plays a part in blurring the line between truth and lies: in their own lives, in the life of their city, their history, their nation, the newly emerging postwar world.
A stunningly audacious work of fiction, Occupied City envelops the reader in its extreme time and place with its brilliantly idiosyncratic, expressionistic, and mesmerizing narrative.
About the Author :
David Peace is the author of the Red Riding Quartet series and was chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. He is the author of six previous novels, published in the UK: the four novels of the Red Riding Quartet, GB84, and The Damned Utd. He was born and raised in West Yorkshire and now lives in the East End of Tokyo with his wife and children.
Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales on 27 October 1914. In 1934 his first book of poetry, Eighteen Poems appeared, followed by Twenty-five Poems in 1936, Deaths and Entrances in 1946 and in 1952 his final volume, Collected Poems. He also published many short stories, wrote filmscripts, broadcast stories and talks, did a series of lecture tours in the United States and wrote Under Milkwood, the radio play.During his fourth lecture tour of the United States in 1953, a few days after his 39th birthday, he collapsed in his New York hotel and died on November 9th at St. Vincent's Hospital. His body was sent back to Laugharne, Wales, where his grave is marked by a simple wooden cross.In June 1994, his wife, Caitlin Thomas, died in Italy, where she had spent most of the years of her life after the death of Dylan Thomas. Her body is buried next to his.
Justine Eyre has turned her passion for reading and remarkable facility with accents into her dream career. This classically trained, multilingual actress has narrated well over 400 audiobooks and has been honored to receive a coveted Audie Award and multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards. Appearing in leading roles onstage in King Lear and The Crucible, she has also graced the screen in Two and Half Men and Mad Men amongst her many television credits. Bronson Pinchot, Audible's Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible's Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People's Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Lorna Raver, named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of the Year, has received numerous Audie nominations and AudioFile Earphones Awards. An experienced stage actress, she has also guest-starred on many top television series and starred in director Sam Raimi's film Drag Me to Hell. Among her many Blackstone titles are The Age of Innocence, Up from Orchard Street, The Lodger, Selected Readings from the Portable Dorothy Parker, and Diamond Ruby.
Alton Takiyama-Chung is a professional storyteller with a passion for Asian folktales and Hawaiian legends. In 2005, he was awarded the first JJ Reneaux Emerging Artist Award by the National Storytelling Network. He currently resides in Vancouver, Washington, and is the technical director of a small theater company in Portland, Oregon.
Stefan Rudnicki is a Grammy-winning audiobook producer and a multiaward-winning narrator, named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices.
Review :
"Occupied City is a stunning--and stunningly challenging--novel, a product of extensive historical research, remarkable imagination, and deep insight. It is certainly among the best books of the new year."
-- "Booklist (starred review)"
"Occupied City is an extraordinary and highly original crime novel...This is a truly remarkable work. It is hugely daring, utterly irresistible, deeply serious and unlike anything I have ever read."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"A tour de force...In Rashômon fashion, a number of disparate characters offer dramatically different perspectives on a horrific crime that claims 12 lives...Peace humanizes his characters and provides subtle insights into how they interpret the facts of the mass murder. This literary thriller will more than satisfy readers with a taste for ambiguity."
-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
"Hypnotic postmodern noir of almost unrivaled fury...Expect to be enthralled and maybe amazed...Peace, a gifted fictional ventriloquist, takes us inside the mental extremities of characters...Hardly any writer can invoke T. S. Eliot and 'The Waste Land' and expect to get away with it, but Peace does. He's an original and ambitious writer. [Occupied City] takes no prisoners."
-- "Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"Like the novels of Stieg Larsson, Peace's books are fueled by political passion...Occupied City [is] genuinely hypnotic...Peace's incantations seem to me to achieve exactly the kind of urgency and intensity he is aiming for...It's no wonder that several critics have compared its mood to Eliot's The Waste Land."
-- "Harper's"
"A genre-busting mystery and meditation on the ambiguity of elusive reality...Peace writes with boatloads of style...The most compelling character is Tokyo itself, a ruined city in a ruined country, a place of shadows and lies that feels not unlike Vienna in 'The Third Man' or wartime Europe in Alan Furst's novels. This backdrop shows how deliberate, bold, and deadly serious Peace is."
-- "Austin American-Statesman"
"A marvellous book."
-- "Daily Telegraph (London)"
"Maintain[s] the fast pace of a historical thriller...This original amalgam of storytelling, history, and style compares to Haruki Murakami in its content and scope but challenges the reader to unravel the mystery in 12 distinct voices."
-- "Library Journal"
"Peace's breathtaking skill renders all [the voices] vividly, forcefully alive...His pulp-modernist style feels honed and refined to scalpel-sharp efficiency...Peace is like a fearsome tornado turning the world on its head."
-- "Financial Times "
"Powerful and ambitious...Peace [is] immensely talented."
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"
"The multiple narrators help sort out the many points of view Peace uses to tell his story. The novel bogs down at points, but the first-rate reading makes this an audiobook experience that improves on the text."
-- "AudioFile"
"The novels Peace produces are uncommonly serious about the nature of the tissues that bind together history, rumour, politics, psychology, community and fiction."
-- "Observer (London)"
"This is a savagely beautiful, richly startling novel...The raw beauty of Peace's language envelops you...He is an astonishing storyteller."
-- "Times (London)"
"Undoubtedly one of the best British novelists working today."
-- "Birmingham Post (UK)"
