Vu

The Story

Vu is an experimental fiction, a novel from a writer who previously wrote plays and was looking for a way to gather together the riches of a lifetime of reading.

His narrator, Gabriel, must entertain the legendary Scheherazade.  Inverting the classic tales of The Arabian Nights, it is she who commands a storyteller to beguile “those interminable nights.” She tells him to start with the Greeks, whose “long oars drip diamond drops.”  From there, with frequent interpolations from Scheherazade,  Gabriel advances across the globe from the Han Ku Pass to the Amazon rainforest, and down the years to the eve of the twenty-first century, offering a collage of scintillating and lyrically-penned images.

A princess reclines on her juniper couch. A captive storyteller muses in his cell, recalling scenes from Hampstead and Wiltshire, and waiting to be conducted to his captor’s apartment by a torch-bearing guide. From time to time he meets the old storyteller, seated beneath a palm tree, fingering prayer beads. They exchange words about freedom and captivity, a theme that is threaded through the narrative.

Clarion Foreword review

Epic in scope, the literary novel, Vu, is made up of woven-together historical tales used to deliver a thorough picture of the past. Using the framework of Arabian Nights, Kenneth Sinclairʼs novel is a history of the world told in a dreamy stream of elegant prose. Each referenced moment is given space to breathe before Gabriel moves on to the next.

Brendan McKelvy

Historical Novel Society review

I’ve never seen a book like this. The words are so beautiful, so image-rich, that they are almost poetry, gorgeous metaphor-filled erudite references to literary and artistic wonders. Every paragraph is a jewel, an ‘iridescent text that causes others… to quiver a little’. They flit like butterflies, never quite anchored, like Japanese tanka court poetry, little bubbles linked not so much by narrative but by theme or emotive effect. A cornucopia for the senses.

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For more about Vu, see the Bryn Glas Blog post, What Kind of Experimental Fiction is Vu

Vu can be ordered from bookshops, or purchased direct from Books on Line, Wales at Gwales.com.

A Pantolwen Press publication.

Reader Reviews