The Execution - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

hugo wilcken is 35, British-Australian. He lives in Paris, where he has worked as a writer since 1990. This is his first book.

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'She was lying on the trolley, two white sheets draped over her. The morgue assistant wheeled the body over to us, then removed the sheets from her face. I stared. A long, faint scratch mark crossed her high forehead diagonally from left to right, like a line drawn across a page to strike it out.'

Matthew Bourne is very much the centre of his own universe. He has a long-term partner, a mistress and a high flying career in a human rights agency, where he is campaigning to secure the release of a condemned African dissident. Then one day a colleague's wife dies in tragic circumstances, and Matthew is called to identify the body. Only much later does he realise that this incident has seeped into his life like a slow poison, and he spirals into a nightmare of death and betrayal…

'The Execution' is a riveting narrative of mystery and menace, of emotional disengagement and passionate action. It is written in a preternaturally smooth prose, occasionally disrupted by the most startling and disturbing sentence. Perhaps the most significant existential novel of the twenty-first century, this is a remarkable debut from a gifted young writer.