A Normal Man

Some people spend their whole lives in the worst seat in the house - and call it safety. For eleven years, Oliver Preadle has sold tickets behind the glass of a faded London theatre. It is the perfect job for a man who has decided, very quietly, to disappear. Because Oliver has a gift he has never told anyone about: he can look at a stranger - the woman who parked badly, the man clutching petrol-station flowers - and in under a minute, he sees everything. Their fear. Their pride. The life they settled for. He gives this gift away for free. He asks for nothing. And he tells himself, for thirty years, that this is enough. Then a dying man in an extraordinary coat walks in out of the rain, buys the worst seat in the house, and offers Oliver a job at a strange enterprise built on a single, unsettling idea: everyone alive is sitting in the wrong seat, kept there by fear. It is the most dangerous proposition of Oliver's life - because to do the work, he will have to stop being invisible. And being seen, he is about to learn, can save a stranger's life. Or end one. Tender, funny, and quietly devastating, A Normal Man is a novel about attention as the truest form of love - and about the bravest, most terrifying thing any of us is ever asked to do: to step out of the warm dark, into the exposed light, and let ourselves be truly seen. For readers of Gabrielle Zevin, Rachel Joyce, and Fredrik Backman - a story that will find the exact people it was written for. "There is no normal man. There is only the man who has not yet been seen."

Pagina's: 210, Paperback, Independently published