Falling Animals: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick

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The novel is told in a series of short third party point of view chapters (with a Greek chorus of other sea victims in the final chapter). Each chapter then tells the story of a different character from that town, their stories separate but connected and overlapping. Nothing I’ve never experienced before (in recent memory, Fernanda Melchor did the sprawling multi-character narrative centred on a dead person much more effectively than this ) but I found that there were elements of this book that simply would not have been possible were it written by someone else. There were no signs of foul play or drowning, but a post-mortem revealed that he had an advanced stage of cancer.

I think anyone who enjoyed The Thing About December or The Spinning Heart would especially love this novel. I’ve been meaning to say that you are one of two book bloggers whom I regularly read who really seem to have my reading needs in mind.It's quite a melancholy tale - the sadness of a sick man dying completely alone is what moved me most of all. The protagonists include: a man collecting the dead body of a seal; the woman who finds the body; the pathologist that examines it – and later her daughter; an artist suffering with MS and earlier her son – who also saw the man; the bus driver who drove the man to the town; a refugee who takes the man’s backpack where he had discarded it; a Filipino seaman on the skeleton staffed ship which wrecked; the galley cook on the ship – who ends up running the café in the town; the boy who started the fire accidentally – in a panic after seeing an apparent person on the wreck (which he keeps secret); a diver who investigates the wreck for salvage photos and also panics – this time seeing bones (which again he does not mention); a Colombian who now runs the town’s bar – his lover the man who as a boy set the wreck on fire (a secret he keeps until a painting the artist makes uncovers his memories); a woman who claims the dead man is her husband; a Guard (policeman) who is involved with much of this; a priest at an Australian seafearers mission who encounters someone we realise is the man who decides, very ill, to set out for Ireland having seen a picture of the wreck; a man serving on a gunship protecting Icelandic ships in the cod wars.

I know that some people had included this in their Booker predictions and it’s a shame that it wasn’t longlisted. Sometimes she finds that her throat is sore, and it is only the rough pain that lets her know she has been silently screaming. A body on the beach found in a sitting position sets the story for some breathtakingly inventive and highly original creative storytelling. Told through a chorus of voices, Falling Animals follows the crosshatching threads of lives both true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present. The disquieting story of an unidentified man as told by those who crossed paths with him on the last day of his life, Sheila Armstrong’s debut novel is haunting, lyrical and darkly suspenseful.of an unidentified man found dead on a Irish beach apparently of natural causes (his body racked with cancer). Sheila Armstrong is in love with the world and its people, and that love shines out clearly in this luminous novel; a novel built on the stories of one small village, shaken loose when a body falls unannounced on the beach. This is a book that is very different to what I was expecting, and wildly different to anything I have read before. The body of a man was found on a beach and despite an extensive police investigation, he was never identified.

However, the main reason I enjoyed the novel is the expert way in which Armstrong imagines the lives of various villagers, revealing the things that make them happy and the troubles that keep them awake at night. sadly I found this depressingly confusing in its lay out and contents after a promising beginning about a mysterious body on a beach . To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. There were not enough common threads in the story for me to be wrapped up in it and it felt a little jarring to meet a new set of main characters every fifteen pages or so. Armstrong doesn't just weave a story well; she gets right under the skin of our characters, drawing out their personality traits with such vitality that they feel known to us almost personally.

I would have preferred some sort of rounding out at the end, but it finished as it began with many unknowns.Though all of the threads tie back to the unknown man found dead on the beach which opens the story, the chapters are personal vignettes with glimpses into characters past lives, desires, and dreams rather. Many thanks to the publisher for an advance copy via NetGalley; as always, this is an honest review. Through vignettes, we get to know the people in the village, and around the world, that came into contact with whoever this man was. Die korte beschrijvingen waren erg treffend, het leek alsof je even kort andere mensenlevens in keek.