Longlisted for The Booker Prize 2025
After losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast--the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. Soon, she encounters some of the people she met last time around: John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew, Petros, an eccentric mechanic; Niko, a handsome diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, and their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing, and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt, and responsibility.
About the Author :
Jonathan Buckley is a writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton. In 2015 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for "Briar Road," and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His previous novel, Tell, was the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, a global, biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize. One Boat is his thirteenth novel.
Review :
"Buckley creates a novel of quiet brilliance and sly humor, packed with mystery and indeterminacy."
-- "The Booker Prize judges"
"A strange, sly and self-assured novel, in which both nothing and everything happens...There is a great deal of freight on board One Boat, but it packs so neatly into 168 pages that it never feels overburdened. This is a novel to be returned to as a place in which to think, just as Teresa returns to her Greek town."
-- "Times Literary Supplement"
"Teresa's story emerges in non-linear fragments of reminiscence and notebook scribbles...An understated story about selfhood emerges from the flotsam of memories and jottings. When Buckley at last pulls back the metafictional curtain in the book's final pages, he formalizes his narrator's driftings and draftings. What seems at first a set of disparate, unpolished vignettes proves to be a masterfully unified conceit."
-- "Literary Review"
