Books by Alison MacLeod

Unexploded is Alison MacLeod's compelling novel of love and prejudice in wartime Brighton.LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013.May, 1940. On Park Crescent, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news of the expected enemy landing on the beaches of Brighton.It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton's Royal Pavilion his English HQ. As the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, and her thoughts become tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a 'degenerate' German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband's internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn's and Otto's mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest. Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.Praise for Alison MacLeod:'Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling' Helen Dunmore 'MacLeod's fictions are evocations of desire and its mysteries . . . [Her] characters are strong, and they are worth listening to' Guardian'MacLeod has an engaged delight in the stuff of life' The Times Literary Supplement'MacLeod's range - spanning the movingly real to the mysteriously surreal - is excitingly, imaginatively realised and unified in awareness of the dark menace of love's uncertainty' MetroAlison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.

Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction is Alison MacLeod's collection of highly charged short stories.Sexy, tender, funny and haunting by turns, the stories in Alison MacLeod's daring collection are tales of lovers, would-be lovers and lovers gone wrong. Here we discover ECT patient Gloria, who falls for her anaesthetist, 'Dr Numb'; the cerebral Nick, who chases after the heavily pregnant Katie at an Ikea sale; and the legendary lovers Heloise and Abelard re-imagined for the twenty-first century. With settings that range from a cheap Paris caf to London's Hayward Gallery, and from the Brighton seafront to the Nova Scotia coast, these stories are at times magical, at times grittily real, but always affecting.'Alison MacLeod is a strikingly original voice. Her stories create intimate worlds and make the reader live in them with an intensity which is haunting, disturbing and above all beguiling' Helen Dunmore'Alison MacLeod's collection of stories is a baker's dozen of excellence book-ended by brilliance' Time Out'Fragmentary evocations of desire and its mysteries, passing glimpses into minds and hearts: tender; pierced; translucent' Guardian 'Beautifully crafted, they range from brilliantly observed humour to the haunting and heart-rending. Immensely readable' Big IssueAlison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. Alison MacLeod is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.

The Wave Theory of Angels is Alison MacLeod's compelling mixture of thriller and philosophical exploration. Two widowed fathers named Giles. The first, woodcarver Giles of Beauvais in thirteenth-century France, whose unearthly skill leads the medieval Church to suspect him of heresy. The second, maverick twenty-first-century physicist Giles Carver, who risks his reputation and livelihood for a heretical theory.Both Gileses have daughters named Christina who each fall into a strange coma from which they will not wake. And in their dreams both girls struggle to return to the world that they left behind - a reality which seems to be turning away from them. Are the memories they cling to real? Is the lover they both dream of a protector - or a more sinister presence? And are the men who claim to be their fathers actually someone else entirely 'Part thriller, part philosophical treatise. Quite wonderful' Time Out'Weaves science with mystery, justified faith with prejudice . . . an unfolding thriller in which the big question is whether one can die of an excess of emotion' Independent on Sunday'A daring investigation of medieval philosophy, modern-day physics, and the relation of both to faith and desire . . . a novel with a passion for ideas. MacLeod has an engaged delight in the stuff of life' The Times Literary Supplement'Utterly delightful, beautifully written' Alberto ManguelAlison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels and Unexploded, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. Unexploded was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2013. Alison MacLeod is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at Chichester University and lives in Brighton.