Nicholas Royle - Mother: A Memoir

A tender and graceful study of parents and children, and a finely judged and measured attempt to capture the flitting, quicksilver shapes of what we keep and what we lose: the touch, the tone, the gaze of the past as it fades. It is a moving and beautifully achieved memoir, and a testament to the writers skill and generosity of spirit.

Hilary Mantel

This is a novel operating at the outer edges of the form, deep in the avant-gardeplay[ing] brilliantly in the fertile ground between fiction and memoir. An English Guide to Birdwatching is Rachel Cusk rewritten by Georges Bataille, full of strange sex, sudden violence and surreal twists. Illuminated throughout with gorgeous illustrations by Natalia Gasson, this is a novel that will charm, unsettle and baffle in equal measure.

Alex Preston, Financial Times

Great books are still written, they just have to take place in Literature, the continent that never forgets. While reading An English Guide to Birdwatching, I travelled in all the time periods, places, countries of literature. It was more than an odyssey

Hlne Cixous

A metafictional fever dream.

The Guardian ii

This is one of the strangest novels Ive read in years. Digressive but coercive, impassioned but fey (digressive and coercive, impassioned and fey), its a curiously compelling investigation of the nature of writing and the writing of nature. I ended it moved in ways I could not explain; I also ended it rather dizzied and thoroughly gulled.

Robert Macfarlane

An ambitious and far-reaching work that tackles many subjects but most of all, its about language: how vocabulary, tone, emphasis, linguistic provenance, double meanings, even rhythm define the way we consume every aspect of life Its also sexy, funny and, in quieter moments, very touching. There is heartfelt writing here we come to think about the nature of love, and about our taking for granted the world beyond language; the sea, the sky, and the birds. Marvellous..

Big Issue

Royle has achieved what no other British writer has yet managed to achieve: to write about birds, people, bankers, capitalism, and climate change all together and in a way that asks us not only to listen but also moves us to act upon what we hear.

Alex Lockwood

This is a book that will bring delight to anyone who likes the idea of a novel in a novel in a novel A fantastic work of literary fiction breaking boundaries and fourth walls to become something unique and highly enjoyable..

The Worm Hole

A daring novel, both wickedly playful and deeply touching.

Alison Moore

A mischievous, comic and inventive literary achievement.

Booktime iii magazine

A book of mythological power. Quilt is unforgettable, like all those great pieces of fiction that are fed by our immemorial root system, the human dream of metamorphosis.

Hlne Cixous

It is quiet, lapidary, and teases out the tangled filaments that link figuration to fact and insight to feeling with the unnerving stealth of a submarine predator.

Will Self

An intense study of grief and mental disintegration, a lexical celebration and a psychological conundrum Royle explores loss and alienation perceptively and inventively.

The Guardian

Royles baroque, athletic prose confers a strong sense of the strangeness of English, which, after all, belongs to no one and should be continually reinvented Moments of delightfully eccentric humour and impressive linguistic experimentalism.

The Observer

A work of remarkable imaginative energy.

Frank Kermode

It is in those commonplace moments at the end of a life moments which Nicholas Royle describes with such piercing accuracy, when this novel is truly at its strangest.

Times Literary Supplement

What deceptively begins as a more or less realistic piece of autobiographical fiction evolves into an astonishing narrative that puts into question the very notion of everyday reality. A highly readable and stunningly original experiment in literary form.

Leo Bersani iv

Captures the absolute dislocating strangeness of bereavement. While the novel is bursting with inventive wordplay, Royles use of language is most agile and beautiful in his descriptions of rays The shifts in point of view have a sort of fairground quality to them, suddenly lurching, demanding your compliance, but it is the way the storyline ultimately develops that takes the breath away.

New Statesman

Quilt is one of those books I long for but come across rarely It is strange, surprising, sui generis with its overturning qualities, its ability to stick in the head while resisting resolution, and its determination not to leave the reader feeling that the end of the text is the end of the reading experience. What my reading life needs what the literary world needs is more Quilts and fewer comfort blankets.

John Self, The Asylum

Pre-word In my minds eye she is sitting at the circular white Formica-top table in the corner. Morning sunlight fills the kitchen. She has a cup of milky Nescaf Gold Blend and is smoking a purple Silk Cut. She is dressed for comfort in floral bronze-and-brown blouse and blue jumper with light gray slacks and blue slippers. She is absorbed in a crossword (The Times) but not oblivious. She does what always takes me aback. She reads out one of the clues. As if Id know the answer. Her gift for crosswords is alien to me. I get stuck at the first ambiguity or double-meaning. Whereas she sweeps through all illusions allusions red herrings and anagrams and is done most days by lunchtime. But her fondness for crossword puzzles is inseparable from my interest in words. Where they come from. What they might be doing. Earliest recorded use of In my minds eye: Shakespeares Hamlet (around 1599). Referring to the Ghost.

My mother died years ago. What has induced me to write about her after all this time remains mysterious to me. It is connected to the climate crisis. As the natural historian David Attenborough says: the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon. In ways I cannot pretend to fathom I have found that writing about my mother is bound up with writing about Mother Nature and Mother Earth. And no doubt it has to do also with my own ageing and the buried life of mourning. The strange timetables of realisation and loss. A memoir is a written record of a persons knowledge of events or of a persons own experiences. A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation. So the dictionaries tell us. But this memoir of my mother makes no attempt at a comprehensive record. It reveals very little about her early life or adolescence. Friends and lovers. Her education. Travel. Work. It doesnt offer any sort of rounded picture. It seems less a record of events than a grappling with what escapes words. Not just love and loss but fire and air and water and earth. Smell and music. Voice and touch.