Kitchenly 434

About the Book

'One of our finest writers' Michael Moorcock

'Alan Warner is one of our best living writers' Jenni Fagan

Kitchenly 434 is set in a sprawling Tudorbethan mansion in Sussex, Kitchenly Mill Race, on the cusp of the arrival of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister. In some ways, the last days of an Age of Innocence.

Marko Morrell, guitarist in Fear Taker, is one of the biggest rock stars in the world. His demanding lifestyle means he is frequently in absentia at Kitchenly, his idyllic country retreat, and so it is his butler (or 'help'), Crofton Clark, who is charged with the maintenance and housekeeping. When, one day, two young girls arrive looking for Marko clutching their copies of Fear Taker LPs, Crofton finds himself on a romantic misadventure which leads to the tragi-comic unravelling of the fantasies he has been living by.

A novel about delusional male behaviour, opening and closing curtains, self-awareness, loneliness and 'getting it together in the country', Kitchenly 434 is a magnificent novel about the Golden Age of Rock in the bucolic English countryside.

About the Author :
Alan Warner is one of Scotland's best loved literary figures. His debut, Morven Callar is a contemporary classic; both it and The Sopranos have been made into famous films. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize and many other awards. He teaches at the University of Aberdeen.

Review :
One of our finest writers, Warner is an original, a school of fiction all his own. He has never been afraid to take risks with style or subject matter. His themes are as unique and substantial as his methods. You can always trust him for an absorbing story, a beautiful, oddly lyrical style, wonderful, memorable characters and great dialogue. I look forward to every new book from him with high expectations! He never disappoints Alan Warner is one of our best living writers, six years since his last novel came out and KITCHENLY 434 has the kind of pin-point precision in prose that has an hallucinatory realness to its ways. Stunning.' Set in an electric Eden of an England that briefly allowed guitar heroes to reinvent themselves as aristocrats almost overnight, Kitchenly 434 is as absurd, beguiling, ridiculous, excessive and comical as the pompous rock stars of the 1970s whose planets this unique novel orbits, and the likes of which we may never see again. Few novels about not much have ever been quite so compelling A delightfully comic tale A compulsively enjoyable tale centred on the 1970s rock scene...stealthily comic...as well as deeply poignant Part farce, part elegy, part tragi-comically belated coming-of-age story, this is a pleasure from beginning to end Kitchenly 434 is a biting, relentless and subtle deconstruction of a particularly English sensibility and a particularly masculine delusion. As funny as it is disturbing, this is Warner on top form Warner's work has always been intriguing and this, I feel, is his most ambitious and haphazard novel since The Man Who Walks. There is a strange echo of Nabokov, whose novels were similarly unreliable and designed as man-traps of a sort. The voice of Crofton, by turns lyrical, lachrymose and ludicrous, is a peculiar elegy. Flummoxed, yes, but the rose-tinted glasses are both rosy and deceptive in a queasily skilful manner Sliding from comedy to elegy to a final moment of redemption, this is a lovely, idiosyncratic book, canny and generous and full of life A gleeful satire about owning and being owned - by places, people, ideas and economic systems . . . a gristly, enjoyably intractable book . . . If you want to know anything, indeed everything, about the general history of the music, Kitchenly 434 is your manual A novel in which This is Spinal Tap crashes into The Remains of the Day . . . it's a triumph and a treat A beautifully observed, witty account of arrested development that sticks with you This very funny, occasionally disturbing, unpredictable novel is as densely layered as any prog-rock organ solo Impressively artful... the novel Kitchenly 434 most brings to mind is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day - albeit in stranger and ruder form... in best Remains of the Day style, the piercing character study at the book's heart is accompanied by a melancholy sense of an era ending. With the rise of punk, Fear Taker are no longer an all-conquering force - and with the election of Margaret Thatcher the glory days of Seventies bohemianism seem numbered too.