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  • Published: 23 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9781473520141
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
Categories:

The Gracekeepers




The magical story of a floating circus and two young women in search of a home.


A flooded world.
A floating circus.
Two women in search of a home.

North lives on a circus boat with her beloved bear, keeping a secret that could capsize her life.

Callanish lives alone in her house in the middle of the ocean, tending the graves of those who die at sea. As penance for a terrible mistake, she has become a gracekeeper.

A chance meeting between the two draws them magnetically to one another - and to the promise of a new life.

But the waters are treacherous, and the tide is against them.

'The Gracekeepers is enchanting and heart-tugging. If you love Margaret Atwood you'll love this' Sunday Telegraph

'A wondrous read' Stylist

'Clever and original' The Times
'Truly magical' Heat

  • Published: 23 April 2015
  • ISBN: 9781473520141
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304
Categories:

About the author

Kirsty Logan

Kirsty Logan is a professional daydreamer. Her first story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales, won the Scott Prize, the Polari First Book Prize and the Saboteur Award. Her first novel, The Gracekeepers, won a Lambda Literary Award and was selected for the Radio 2 Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club. A Portable Shelter won the Gavin Wallace Fellowship and Things We Say in the Dark, a collection of feminist horror stories, was optioned for TV. Her short fiction and poetry have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, Italian and Chinese, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and exhibited in galleries. She lives in Glasgow with her family.

@kirstylogan
www.kirstylogan.com

Also by Kirsty Logan

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Praise for The Gracekeepers

An enchanting, magical tale, and Kirsty Logan’s writing is beautiful. Compelling and vivid, with Scottish lore woven lyrically throughout, The Gracekeepers explores such issues as loneliness and isolation, our innate tendencies to create divisions between ourselves and others, the consequences of long-ago actions, and, ultimately, the restoration of hope.

Sara Gruen

A bewitching tale

Big Issue

Beautiful and bewitching: read it and be swept away on a magical wave of love and language

Bookseller

The Gracekeepers is a seemingly impossible combination of the lyrical and the gritty, the magical and the brutal. In haunting prose Kirsty Logan has woven a compelling, emotionally dense fairytale that kept me enthralled ‘til the last page

Tamar Cohen

A bold, fresh new talent… a wild, original imagination

Independent on Sunday

A gorgeously melancholy novel, a post-apocalyptic fairy tale of mermen and mourning birds, ghost cities on the ocean floor, and precious soil. I envy the reader who is just now picking it up.

Herald

Highly original ... set in a haunting sea-world both familiar and mysterious

Ursula K. Le Guin

[Logan] has picked up [Angela] Carter’s mantle and has written, in her own alluring voice, a fairy tale which glitters like sun on the sea where it is set, weaving a story in which all readers can, if they allow themselves to see it, discover something of their own desires and dreams...one to relish and re-read with great excitement

Welsh Arts Review

[A] remarkable story about love, family, roots and obligations... A colourful magic realist novel about finding your place

Diva

There's a dreamy coolness to this magical debut

Psychologies

A wondrous read

Stylist

Truly magical

Heat

A delightful fantasy in the mould of The Night Circus

Red

The Gracekeepers is enchanting and heart-tugging. If you love Margaret Atwood you’ll love this

Sunday Telegraph

Rich and strange... memorable and beautiful

Daily Mail

This is truly an extraordinary novel...This has a delightful fantasy quality in the mould of The Snow Child or The Night Circus... Memorable and captivating

Viv Groskop, Red

This modern fairytale has moments of exceptional insight and thrilling action

Theresa Munoz, Herald

A book worthy to find its way into your suitcase for that early summer break… Will delight fans of The Night Circus and The Snow Child and is one of the most exciting and enchanting debut novels of 2015

What’s On in Swansea

Lyrical and moving

ELLE

Everything about this book is beautiful: the language is a poetic and diaphanous as nature and the many characters who contribute to the story are utterly authentic in this magic realist world. Every one of them stays with you, leaving you craving more about their back stories and their fates… This is a delicious piece of work from a supremely talented young writer

Scotsman

A mystical and beautiful tale

Sun

Clever and original

Kate Saunders, The Times

Kirsty Logan is definitely one to watch

Emma Walton (Waterstones, Argyle Street), Sunday Mail

This is a novel of the liminal and the liquid, seeking new ways of living together and new forms of life in a world that humans have transformed almost beyond the possibility of our own survival

Sarah Ditum, Guardian

The Gracekeepers has, undoubtedly, exceeded even the highest of expectations. It’s a book to devote a day to, uninterrupted – or you’ll curse the cruelty of the call to work… Most debut novelists can only hope to create a story. Gently, deftly, Logan has created a whole world

Skinny

Logan builds an enchanting cocoon over time, one which I was reluctant to leave… A touching and lovely modern love story about an alternative family

Jane Graham, Big Issue

Logan’s prose is dreamlike and strange, but she has a firm grasp of the realities of rivalry and love

Eithne Farry, Sunday Express

Fans of S.M. Wheeler’s Sea Change and Emmi Itaranta’s Memory of Water will appreciate this latest genre-bending work

Washington Post

A strong first novel for Logan

John Grey, Gladstone Observer

It’s a softly magical tale, gentler than most contemporary dystopias, but no less compelling

Lucy Scholes, Independent

This is a seriously good book. You don’t just believe it, you breathe it

Benjamin Judge, Book Munch

Lyrical [and] poetic

Ian Hunter, Interzone

A beautiful dreamy book… Engaging and strange and lovely.

Elaine Gallagher, Interzone

The world Logan creates is fascinating…The Gracekeepers is told in beautifully written language… It is a vivid, evocative and imaginative glimpse into a potential future.

Ian Simpson, Nudge