A story in this collection has been longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG short story award As it
was it was like being set down in the best of poems carried into a cold landscape
blindfolded turned around unblindfolded forced then to invent new ways of seeing. It is a
cold day in January when J. Mendelssohn wakes in his Upper East Side apartment. Old and frail
he is entirely reliant on the help of his paid carer and as he waits for the heating to come
on the clacking of the pipes stirs memories of the past of his childhood in Lithuania and
Dublin of his distinguished career as a judge and of his late wife Eileen. Later he leaves
the house to meet his son Elliot for lunch and when Eliot departs mid-meal Mendelssohn
continues eating alone as the snow falls heavily outside. Moments after he leaves the
restaurant he is brutally attacked. The detectives working on the case search through the
footage of Mendelssohn's movements captured by cameras in his home and on the street. Their
work is like that of a poet: the search for a random word that included at the right instance
will suddenly make sense of everything. Told from a multitude of perspectives in lyrical
hypnotic prose Thirteen Ways of Looking is a ground-breaking novella of true resonance.
Accompanied by three equally powerful stories set in Afghanistan Galway and London this is a
tribute to humanity's search for meaning and grace from a writer at the height of his form
capable of imagining immensities even in the smallest corners of our lives.
