Simon Willis

Tragedy of Loneliness

Julius Winsome

By

Faber & Faber 215pp £10.99 order from our bookshop

Veins of hostility and menace run through Gerard Donovan’s fiction. Whether one thinks of the baker digging his own grave in the Booker long-listed Schopenhauer’s Telescope, a novel animated by dialogue that reads like a litany of human barbarism, or the paranoid Sunless in the author’s second outing, Dr Salt, the lives of Donovan’s characters might easily be called ‘Hobbesian’. Now the name of the philosopher so famously associated with the solitude, brutality and brevity of life in the state of nature ricochets around the forests of Northern Maine at the beginning of Donovan’s third novel, the starkly beautiful and compelling Julius Winsome, as Julius shouts the name of his doomed dog, deliberately shot in the woods. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    Follow Us