Richard Mason
Description
Product Description
A murder mystery, this novel is narrated by a 60-year old man who has just killed his wife. The plot then moves back in time to w
...
hen the man was 22 and the story eventually reveals why he becomes a killer 40 years later.
Amazon.com Review
"My wife of more than forty-five years shot herself yesterday afternoon. At least that is what the police assume, and I am playing the part of grieving widower with enthusiasm and success... It was I who killed her." Thus begins the much-hyped first novel by 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate Richard Mason. Your typical murder mystery
The Drowning People is not, for we are given the identity of the killer--the
who--immediately. The puzzle in this introspective novel is
why--why did 70-year-old James Farrell murder his aristocratic wife, Sarah? The answer lies nearly 50 years into the past as the book ranges from Prague to London, from France to a remote castle in Cornwall. At its core is an intoxicating love affair between 22-year-old James, a talented violinist and hopeless romantic, and Ella Harewood, an American heiress to an English title, trapped by her heritage and destiny. A beautifully written exploration of self-absorbed first love and its tragic consequences,
The Drowning People soars beyond the highest of expectations placed upon it.
--Shannon Bingham, Amazon.co.uk
Review
"EXCEPTIONAL...A VERY IMPRESSIVE FIRST NOVEL...HOOKS YOU UNTIL THE END". -- The Times (London)
From the Back Cover
My wife of more than forty-five years shot herself yesterday afternoon. At least that is what the police assume, and I am playing the part of grieving widower with enthusiasm and success. Of course I know that she did nothing of the kind....It was I who killed her.
With this startling confession of murder, James Farrell, the seventy-year-old narrator of THE DROWNING PEOPLE, takes the reader on a long journey into the past, a maelstrom of deeply buried secrets and betrayals, that reveals the ferocious, frightening power of first love. For it was decades ago that James and a young woman named Ella Harcourt fell cataclysmically in love -- and unwittingly set off a chain of events that would reverberate violently for years to come.
Heralded as one of the most electrifying international literary debuts in years, THE DROWNING PEOPLE introduces us to an extraordinary new voice from an exciting young author.
From Kirkus Reviews
A 20-year Oxford students precocious debut: dazzling in its inventive plot, persuasive in its mannerisms, and much too susceptible to mistaking agile chatter for deep wisdom. Mason has created a grabby premise: in an effort to explain why James Farrell has just killed Sarah, his wife of four decades, the now 70-year-old recalls the privileged, wainscoted, chandeliered, wealthy England of his youthway back in the1990s. The story begins in 1994, with just a few closing pages devoted to the present in mid-21st century. James sees enigmatic Ella Harewood meditatively smoking on a park bench and falls immediately in love. Though she is engaged to be married, Ella discovers she shares Jamess covert disgust with convention, and together they conspire to upset the wedding plans. Though educated and raised in America, Ella confides to James that she stands to inherit Selon Castle and its island, a family property Ella's cousin Sarah yearns to inhabit. Conventional, restrained, and proper in the English way, Sarah develops an ardent jealousy of her spoiled cousin. Worse, Ella's groom is the one love of her life. The wedding is indeed disrupted, and Ella requires James to prove his love by setting in motion a series of events that end with the death of his best friend. James is stricken by grief and, after Ella apparently murders her father, he marries Sarah. Years later, on the eve of his 70th birthday, James discovers the cruel secret that leads to Sarah's death. Throughout, our protagonist considers the nature of time and
Read more