Monument Maker

A ROUGH TRADE BOOK OF THE YEAR CONCRETE ISLANDS NO. 1 BOOK OF THE YEAR 'In a dizzying gyroscopic vortex of inner archeology, David Keenan sifts through spiraling past lives to unearth his provocative vision of the future. A colossus of imagination' LENNY KAYE 'Visionary and prismatic, gloriously hallucinatory although grounded in the material, Monument Maker's grand sweep takes in distant historical subterrains, a shimmering summer of the present, the transient, the eternal, the profane, the divine' WENDY ERSKINE 'I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream' EDNA O'BRIEN 'A masterpiece' WILLIAM BASINSKI Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranea that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day, where the memory of a single summer, and a love affair that took place across the cathedrals of Ile de France, unravels, as a secret initiatory cult is uncovered that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe. MONUMENT MAKER straddles genres while fully embracing none of them, a book within a book within a book that runs from hallucinatory historical epics through future-visioned histories of the world narrated by a horribly disfigured B...