Keith Ridgway – författare

A novel of confusion and paranoia, love and doubt, fear and hysteria: unsettling, unhinged, provocative and bestially funny, ‘Animals’ is for human beings everywhere.Keith Ridgway's third novel is a psychological menagerie of confusion, paranoia, searching and love. Narrated by an illustrator who can no longer draw, it tells of the sudden and inexplicable collapse of a private life, and the subsequent stubborn search for a place from which to take stock. We are surrounded here – by unsafe or haunted buildings, by artists and capitalists who flirt with terror, by writers and actresses and the deals they have made with unreality, and by the artificial, utterly constructed, scripted city in which we have agreed to live out a version of living. But there are cracks in the facade, and there are stirrings under the floorboards, and there are animals everywhere you look, if only you'd dare to look for them.Unsettling, unhinged, provocative and richly funny, ‘Animals’ is for human beings everywhere.

A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death*Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Esquire and the New European*Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

A collection of brand-new short stories written by prize-winning, bestselling writers and inspired by Kafka - published to commemorate the centenary of his death*Chosen as a 2024 highlight in the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Esquire and the New European*Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the great geniuses of twentieth-century literature. What happens when some of the most original literary minds of today take an idea, a mood or a line from his work and use it to spark something new?From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these ten specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting. Inspired by the visionary imagination of a writer working one hundred years ago, they speak powerfully to the strangeness of being alive today.

'Kafka himself would love it' The i'As captivating as it is thought-provoking' Glamour'Unsettling and uneasy' Daily Mail'Glorious' Harper's BazaarA collection of brand-new short stories written by major international writers and inspired by Kafka What happens when Kafka's idionsyncratic imagination meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English across the globe today? In this collection of stories, commissioned to commemorate one hundred years since his death, ten of our most celebrated international writers take ideas of Kafka's - motifs from his stories, titles of his famous works, or unfinished fragments left behind in his Blue Octavo Notebooks - and run with them to make something new.

Never Love a Gambler is a showcase for the exceptional talents of Keith Ridgway. The Times (London) praised his stories as “flawlessly structured yarns told in lovingly crafted prose.” Ridgway’s characters negotiate their way through love, madness, lust, anger, religious obsession, crime, and absence in stories told with innovative mastery — brightened by fiercely vivid dialogues. Never Love a Gambler is a mental rust-remover: refreshing, bracing, and often violently funny.

WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022‘Remarkable' - Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn'Like Finnegans Wake, only readable' - The TimesIn A Shock, a clutch of more or less loosely connected characters appear, disappear and reappear. They are all of them on the fringes of London life, often clinging on – to sanity, solvency or a story – by their fingertips. With this deftly conjured high-wire act, Ridgway achieves a fine balance between drama and fidelity to his characters. The result is pin-sharp and breathtaking.Book of the Year Selection in the Guardian, New York Times, Spectator, Hot Press and The White ReviewShortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize

Hawthorn and his partner, Child, are called to the scene of a mysterious shooting in North London. The only witness is unreliable, the clues are scarce, and the victim, a young man who lives nearby, swears he was shot by a ghost car. While Hawthorn battles with fatigue and strange dreams, the crime and the narrative slip from his grasp and the stories of other Londoners take over: a young pickpocket on the run from his boss; an editor in possession of a disturbing manuscript; a teenage girl who spends her days at the Tate Modern; and a madman who has been infected by former Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Haunting these disparate lives is the shadowy figure of Mishazzo, an elusive crime magnate who may be running the city, or may not exist at all.

Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that – there are no cars; there are moving footpaths; there is no church; everything seems quite queer. Mew has arrived in a Dublin that is alive with song, with rumour, with ghosts, and with an unmistakable sense of insurgency. In this suspiciously timeless city that breathes an old revolutionary air, Mew fiercely misses his beloved Mootie, back home in London. An unravelling, an impossibility, a gathering of voices and a single dream, Dooneen is the layered, allusive and wildly original new novel from Keith Ridgway, ‘one of Ireland’s best writers, in a country with no shortage of them’ (The Times).