The Mariner's Star - Hardcover

'An exquisite novel...a treat to be lingered over'

'From the opening lines, THE MARINER'S STAR seizes and holds you by the force of its writing, with startling, vital images on every page and the musical rhythms of the prose...THE MARINER'S STAR is a love story and, like all great love stories, a death story... The novel's cumulative effect is emotionally rocking. The writing is so evocative that to read it feels like being inside a painting...I wasn't far in before I was wondering whether there was anything much Candida Clark couldn't do. By page 43, I had already recommended the book twice. By the end, I was making a list of people to whom I intended to give it...It left me feeling hollowed out and weepy, although I hesitate to say so, because its overall effect is of such intense, and profound, pleasure' - Geraldine Bedell, OBSERVER

'Beautifully written by a novelist to watch' Robert McCrum, Observer

'Clark writes mellifluously. Image is piled upon image. Rhapsodic evocation of sensuous pleasure gives way to equally rhapsodic description of natural beauty...This is literary lace-making, insubstantial but exquisite' The Sunday Times

'Clark is an interesting and imaginative novelist...far too few of today's fiction writers take risks with form or style' Guardian

'Poetry [to] savour...its ultimately optimistic message of new life emerging from grief lingers and comforts' Independent

'In astonishingly beautiful prose - taut, lyrical, passionate and poetic - the young Candida Clark tells the increasingly irresistible story of her journey towards, and through, the enticing allure of memory and utter despair' Harpers & Queen

'Arresting...The Mariner's Star is unlike anything else currently being written in England, worked out with enormous conviction and conveying the seriousness of its authorial purpose at every turn' DJ Taylor, The Literary Review

Praise for THE LAST LOOK

'As close as prose can get to poetry and vividly feels its way around in

two people's minds' JP Donleavy

'A bright little jewel - passionate, glittering, wonderfully allusive, with

a narrative line that is both subtle and complex. It is full of pleasures,

many of them sensual' Paul Theroux

'Clark hits the ground running in this haunting first novel' Telegraph

'Beautifully written' The Times

'Sensuous and confident...rich in striking poetic language' Guardian

'Every moment is intensely vivid... Clark's writing is heavily poetic'

The Times

'Maturity way beyond her years... an extremely powerful piece of writing'

Oxford Times

Praise for THE CONSTANT EYE:

'Bringing to mind the best work of Muriel Spark... this is writing that

restores the sense of novels being a forbidden treat' Independent

'Audacious...works very well' Telegraph

'An idiosyncratic mix of icy elegance and stewed carnality...richly

energetic' Guardian

'Vice-like and urgent, Clark's writing grips you while its poetry demands

slow savouring. The result is a book that renders its reader a voluntary

captive until the close' Metro

'A meditation on the nature of writing itself... by challenging our

expectations, Clark forces us to read carefully, and to be aware of the

very seductiveness of storytelling' New Statesman

'Intense, direct prose... a smart chalking-up of the price life must pay

for art' Condé Nast Traveller

'A delicate, poetic and unforgettably moving miniature of grief and resignation' Sue Gaisford, Independent on Sunday

The Mariner's Star is a gripping, dramatic adventure and a mesmeric love story: the last hours of a woman who has lost her husband at sea, and sets out to face her own inevitable death. As storms, shipwrecks and her own buried secrets conspire against her, her chances of surviving for long enough either to kill herself, or to find redemption, begin to grow very slim. This problem, and its solution, makes The Mariner's Star one of the most exciting, moving, and powerful novels you will ever read.