THE UNDERTAKING by Audrey Magee has been longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014 (previously the Orange Prize), announced today:LONGLIST 2014
“A bold and unsettling feat of empathy, all the more daring for its taut, beautifully understated style” A. D. Miller (author of SNOWDROPS)
“Audrey Magee is one of the most exciting new talents to arrive on the literary scene. There is an emotional depth to her writing which elevates her to the top rank of contemporary novelists. I read her book with awe and gratitude.” Fergal Keane
“The Undertaking’ is written with sympathy and skill. The narrative is tense and engaging, filled with complex undertones, impelled by an urgency and a deep involvement with the characters.” Colm Toibin
“A violent, elegant, unsentimental journey through hell and halfway back. This is an outstanding novel by a writer of huge talent and unusual candour.” Chris Cleave
“Audrey Magee is a writer with great understanding for the force of history impacting on the lives of ordinary German people during World War 2. The story of a proxy marriage offers a perfect view into the urgency and magnitude of life with its doomed interior landscape of wartime necessities and moral ambiguities under Hitler’s Reich. The Undertaking is a novel of wonderful subtlety and acceleration” Hugo Hamilton
“No one expects new ground in yet another Nazi-era novel, so it’s a genuine surprise to discover that’s exactly what we get from Audrey Magee’s debut… Magee certainly offers an original take… an engaging read… An impressive, even stunning, debut.” Katie Binns, The Sunday Times
“ambitious, assured and successful… the praise which Toibin, Keane and Hamilton accorded [THE UNDERTAKING] is fully justified” Allan Massie, The Scotsman
“a novel made all the more harrowing by its extreme readability… [Magee] pulls off a feat of high wire empathy” Hephzibah Anderson, The Observer
“It’s only February, but already an Irish novel has emerged as a potential book of the year… remarkable” Joe Duffy, The Irish Mail on Sunday
“accomplished…[Magee] takes us on a moving journey through the emotional hinterlands of grief and guilt” Anita Sethi, Sunday Express
“This sweeping, powerful, epic story would make a terrific film; Magee’s writing is fast-moving, with a great visual sense, and conversations so believable that you can almost hear them.” Kate Saunders, The Times
“Magee’s cool, precise tone recalls Hans Fallada’s ALONE IN BERLIN, and, like Heinrich Böll, Magee is haunted by the everyday and the small people who are inseparably part of a great ravagement… Magee’s boldness is one of her attractive qualities as a writer. Another is her honesty… At its best, her novel possesses the nightmarish economy of fable.” Helen Dunmore, The Observer
THE UNDERTAKING by Audrey Magee, which was published in the US this summer by Grove Press, has been getting very positive reviews. As you may know, the reviews for Atlantic Book’s edition here in the UK and in Ireland were also very positive. Please find a selection of review quotes below.
THE UNDERTAKING was an Irish Times hardback bestseller and was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for fiction. Translation rights have been sold to Beta in the Czech Republic, Ambo Anthos in Holland, Plon in France, Kinneret in Israel, Bollati Boringhieri (Mauri Spagnol) in Italy, Atena in Finland, and Lind in Sweden.