Katherine Carlyle

Katherine Carlyle is the breakthrough novel for literary novelist Thomson. Philip Pullman has already hailed the book 'a masterpiece.' The story, contemporary, concerns the discovering of one's self; identity and family - in the words of Richard Flanagan: 'this road trip through a snow dome of mesemeric hallucinations is Thomson at his best.' Book of the Year in the Observer and Guardian'Katherine Carlyle is fluid, visual, deft as a thriller ... You're gripped exactly as you would be by a movie...Shocking and satisfying all at once' GuardianKatherine Carlyle was an IVF baby, frozen as an embryo for eight years. Two decades later, she's living a glamorous life in Rome, surrounded by friends, but she's still haunted by the strange circumstances of her conception - her long incarceration in the dark, the cold.Following a series of random signs and signals that she believes are directed at her, she gives away her laptop, drops her phone in the river, and flies to Berlin, telling no one where she has gone. It's the beginning of a journey that will take her further and further north, from the world she knows into a world in which nothing is predictable or safe... 'Katherine's story, a profound, unnerving meditation on love and existence, is the canvas to which Thomson applies colour and beauty ... Brilliant' Independent'This riveting and visionary story haunted me long after I finished the last page ... Katherine Carlyle is an extraordinary novel' Deborah Moggach'A contemporary masterpiece' Robert McCrum, Observer In the late 80s, Katherine Carlyle is created using IVF. Stored as a frozen embryo for eight years, she is then implanted in her mother and given life. By the age of nineteen Katherine has lost her mother to cancer, and feels her father to be an increasingly distant figure. Instead of going to college, she decides to disappear, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing-ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-scene for a courageous leap from false empowerment to true empowerment.Written in the beautifully spare, lucid and cinematic prose that Thomson is known for, Katherine Carlyle uses the modern techniques of IVF and cryopreservation to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about where we come from, what we make of ourselves, and how we are loved.