"ALEXANDRIA"- latest Novel by Paul Kingsnorth is Published
The visionary final novel in Paul Kingsnorth’s iconic Buckmaster Trilogy – a timely and seminal portrait of climate apocalypse.
The Author wrote: "...This week my third novel, Alexandria, is published in paperback in the UK by Faber & Faber. Novelists are contractually obliged to boast about their books when they come out, even though most of us find it quite uncomfortable. Still, we’d find it more uncomfortable if nobody read them, so we have no right to complain.
“... I am a writer. I know how to construct stories. I know what makes them succeed or fail, and I have a nose for when a story does not hang together. The covid Narrative is just such a story. It doesn’t fit together, even on its own terms. Something is wrong. The surface tale does not reflect what lies beneath. And what lies beneath is what interests me now.”
Alexandria was originally to be published, with disastrous timing, a couple of months after covid arrived. It finally came out last year, but it hasn’t been a good time to get books noticed, especially books about the end of the world; and Alexandria is that kind of book. The final part of my Buckmaster trilogy, it is set a thousand years in the future, in what was once the English fens, and its theme, you may not be surprised to learn, is humanity (or what remains of it) versus the Machine.
Like my other books, Alexandria bends language in an attempt to peel it away and see what lies beneath. Words, as I explored at length in my last non-fiction book Savage Gods, are tricky things. We have to question them sometimes, or they will assert themselves over us and pose as reality, instead of simply pointing us towards it. Alexandria explores words, birds, the meaning of the human body, progress, God, land, the eschaton: all my usual themes, in other words, only this time with a story - and some plot twists.
I won’t say anymore. Instead I’ll offer up this video conversation that I recorded on first publication with my friend Martin Shaw, mythologist and author, who has long dug into the same veins. You can hear me reading from the book, and listen to us exploring its wider themes, whilst admiring both of our luxurious lockdown beards."
Read more about Alexandria here. Purchase it in the UK here or here, or in the US here, or in any good bookshop.
