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A Sabbatical in Leipzig

A Sabbatical in Leipzig

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Author: Adrian Duncan
€15,00 EUR
€15,00 EUR
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Michael, a retired engineer, has lived away from Ireland for most of his life and now resides alone in Bilbao after the death of his girlfriend, Catherine. Each day he listens to two versions of the same piece of music before walking the same route to visit Richard Serra’s enormous permanent installation, The Matter of Time, in the Guggenheim Museum. Over the course of 45 minutes before he leaves his apartment, Michael reflects on past projects and how they have endured, the landscape of his adolescence, and his relationship with Catherine, which acts as the marker by which he judges the passing of time.

Over the course of the narrative, certain fascinations crop up: electricity, porcelain, the bogland of his youth, a short story by Robert Walser, and a five-year period of prolonged mental agitation spent in Leipzig with Catherine. This ‘sabbatical’, caused by the stress of his job and the suicide of a former colleague, splits his career as an engineer into two distinct parts.

A Sabbatical in Leipzig is intensely realistic, mapped out like Michael’s intricate drawings. With a clear voice and precise, structured thoughts, we are brought from an empty landscape to envision the creation of structures in cities across Europe, from London to Leipzig and Bilbao. This narrator has left the void of his world in rural Ireland to build new environments elsewhere, yet remains connected to his homeland. Duncan’s second novel stands alone as a substantial and compelling work of literary fiction.

Details

ISBN: 9781843517764

Extent: 184

Published:

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Praise and Reviews

  • ‘You move through this book, as though at a contemporary art exhibition … It is slow and affecting and really quite beautiful.’ Niamh Donnelly, Irish Times

  • ‘A Sabbatical in Leipzig is by turn poetic and forensic, exuberant and melancholy. At all times, it is an entirely riveting, deeply felt musing on intimacy, loneliness and the nature of perception itself.’ Sue Rainsford

  • ‘shades of Beckett [and] calls to mind WG Sebald … conjuring a deep and strange sense of stillness that hints at a discomfiting truth: this is a material world and we are merely passing through it.’ Houman Barekat, The Sunday Times

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About the Author

Adrian Duncan was born in County Longford and originally trained as an engineer. He is a Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker. His short fictions have appeared in literary journals both in Ireland and the USA. His acclaimed debut novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site, published by Lilliput and Head of Zeus in 2019. He was shortlisted for the Emerging Writer Award at the inaugural 2020 Dalkey Literary Awards and won the inaugural John McGahern Annual Book Prize. His second novel, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, was published by Lilliput in 2020 and is forthcoming from Profile Books. It was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2021. His first short story collection, Midfield Dynamo, was published in 2021 and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His most recent novel, The Geometer Lobachevsky, has been shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.

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