Shock

WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022‘Remarkable' - Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn'Like Finnegans Wake, only readable' - The TimesIn A Shock, a clutch of more or less loosely connected characters appear, disappear and reappear. They are all of them on the fringes of London life, often clinging on – to sanity, solvency or a story – by their fingertips. With this deftly conjured high-wire act, Ridgway achieves a fine balance between drama and fidelity to his characters. The result is pin-sharp and breathtaking.Book of the Year Selection in the Guardian, New York Times, Spectator, Hot Press and The White ReviewShortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize

Keith Ridgway offers his London a luminous glow, but his competing narratives are also rooted in a real place, with a remarkable sense of character and the shifting systems that make up his contemporary urban space, Like Finnegans Wake, only readable., Ingeniously slippery . . . an expertly constructed house of mirrors , A sultry, steamy shock of a novel . . . a provocative collection of nine interlinked stories, jostled together like neighbours on a London street or regulars in a pub, which is where most of his characters cross paths, Keith Ridgway's gifts as a writer are many: his complex, vivid characters, his ability to create a humane and tender cityscape in an unfeeling metropolis, and to dig into our fallibilities and desires with such humour and compassion

Keith Ridgway is from Dublin, and lives in London. A Shock is his fifth novel.