Author Name
Author Name
LITERARY, FILM & TV AGENCY
MARIANNE GUNN O'CONNOR
A Thought Without Collision
Summer, 1923. Six-year-old Catherine Carolan grows restless on her parents' farm. It's already clear that her intellect will soon outgrow the two-room schoolhouse across the fields. But in post-Civil War Ireland, an education is not an easy thing for a girl to access, and young Catherine is not the only one in her family who will come to tire of rural life.
Summer, 1951. To ease him through his final days, Dr. Josef Alois calls for someone from his past. Enter Catherine Carolan, now an Oxford professor. As Alois's mind and body falter, Catherine must decide how far she will follow this man that she loves.
A novel in two strands, A Thought without Collision is a beautiful meditation on how we construct our relationship to the world around us.
Praise for A Thought Without Collision
“A brilliant interrogation of philosophy and wonder ... In Duncan's fiction, the Irish realist tradition converges with a cerebral European mode”
Daisy Hildyard ― Guardian
“A tender examination of our relationships to one another and the world around us ... layered with complexity”
Irish News
“Adrian Duncan's account of a mathematical prodigy and the characters who shape her life is for me his best work yet. The dual timelines build into a compelling enquiry into how we perceive and affect the world that we pass through. It's very moving, very funny, and it will make your brain dance”
Jo Lloyd
“I was so impressed and moved by this novel. With formal innovation and elegant, blistering prose, Duncan offers a different model of novelistic causality, with characters that feel alive in their vivid and quiet complexity”
Susannah Dickey
“The book is an elegant rarity in contemporary fiction: a novel in which form, voice, style and story are inseparable from each other”
Cathy Sweeney