The event that changed all of their lives happened on a Saturday afternoon in June, just minutes after Michael Turner – thinking the Nelsons’ house was empty – stepped through their back door.
After the sudden loss of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London and quickly develops a close friendship with the Nelson family next door. Josh, Samantha and their two young daughters seem to represent everything Michael fears he may now never have: intimacy, children, stability and a family home. Despite this, the new friendship at first seems to offer the prospect of healing, but then a catastrophic event changes everything. Michael is left bearing a burden of grief and a secret he must keep, but the truth can only be kept at bay for so long.
Moving from London and New York to the deserts of Nevada, I Saw A Man is a brilliant exploration of violence, guilt and attempted redemption, written with the pace and grip of a thriller. Owen Sheers takes the reader from close observation of the domestic sphere to some of the most important questions and dilemmas of the contemporary world.
Reviews:
This is an expertly crafted thriller that plumbs the depths of grief, sorrow, desire, remorse. The suspense that builds up over the course of the novel is given ballast by deeper questions about responsibility and selfhood. (The Straits Times)
It is a measure of Mr. Sheers’s artfulness and exquisite narrative control that even though he withholds for half of the novel the solution to the mystery posed in the first paragraph, he never loses us. (The New York Times)
Witty, stylish and smartly relevant. (The Independent)
Owen Sheers: an interview with contemporary literature’s renaissance man. I Saw A Man is Sheers’s most mature and coherent work to date; taut as a thriller, but resonant with motifs of intimacy and distance, guilt and redemption, and the nature of stories and storytelling. (The Guardian)
A powerful, dark study of brutality, grief and guilt … There are so many expertly detonated surprises … Immensely pleasurable … This is an exemplary thriller, clever, classy, slick – and always one step ahead of the reader. (Sunday Times)
A rare and luscious treat for the reader. (The Times)
A gripping and stylish thriller … finely tuned suspense that erupts into visceral drama … An award-winning poet, his honed prose is full of images of photographic sharpness that leap from the page. But this is also a novel driven by ideas, which, in keeping with its central theme, spins out across the world … bold and satisfying. (Daily Mail)
Sheers’ thriller is driven as much by subtle ideas as suspense … psychologically astute … Sheers writes carefully about careless people and the results present the reader with a reflective window on to self-deception … a clever novel. (Independent)
Extraordinarily tense and powerful, and beautifully written (Mail on Sunday)
The story is at its most gripping when untangling the “causal web” leading to tragic consequences, spanning out to New York and the Nevada deserts … A profound meditation on memory and mourning. (Observer)
A powerful moral thriller … Sheers skilfully drip-feeds the reader his characters’ secrets and lies, including a remarkable sequence leading up to the book’s central, shocking moment of revelation … I Saw A Man‘s ending is similarly bravura, elegantly throwing into new light much of what has gone before. (Literary Review)
If you like your fiction served at a thrilling pace with arcing storylines that bring global politics right into the lives of ordinary people then I Saw A Man is for you … has the gripping pace and drama of a Gone Girl-esque blockbuster … gorgeously written. (Stylist)
The stately prose and cool omniscience in I Saw A Man provide the perfect cover for the roiling sea of emotions under its surface … One of the book’s great strengths is how difficult it becomes to tell the good guys from the bad as the story progresses. The second half flies by, the pulse quickening as the moral landscape grows ever murkier. Settled domesticity gives way to a quietly charged, Dostoyevskian psychic chaos whose outcomes are thrillingly uncertain. (Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves)
Sheers’ language is consistently rich and engaging, precisely calibrated to the circumstances he’s describing. (Slate)
The big reveal in the London house promised by the novel’s opening lines is a genuinely gripping piece of storytelling. (Financial Times)
A highly original, engrossing literary thriller … Sheers is a writer with a sharp eye for both the big picture and the lovely detail. (Kirkus Starred Review)
Owen Sheers is a writer whose great gifts and imagination are on full display in I Saw A Man – a commodious and mesmerizing exploration of guilt and sorrow and the tangled web woven out of our lies. (Louis Begley)
Owen Sheers is an exquisite and exceptional talent. He navigates terrain that is both globally complex and crushingly intimate — all with a poet’s quiet grace. Spectacular. This book is a prize in itself. (Alison Wearing)
Praise for the novel:
The stately prose and cool omniscience in I Saw A Man provide the perfect cover for the roiling sea of emotions under its surface. Left behind by a spouse who risked her life for a professional adventure, Michael Turner is bent to the will of an enduring grief, crying out in silence behind the masks and routines of everyday survival. His anguish becomes a black hole that pulls several lives into its inexorable gravity-including that of the guilt-wracked man who caused his wife’s demise. One of the book’s great strengths is how difficult it becomes to tell the good guys from the bad as the story progresses. The second half flies by, the pulse quickening as the moral landscape grows ever murkier. Settled domesticity gives way to a quietly charged, Dostoyevskian psychic chaos whose outcomes are thrillingly uncertain. (Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves)
A profound meditation on memory and mourning, Sheers’s novel captures the ‘unbearably fragile’ nature of joy and movingly depicts the haunting physical reminders we leave behind – footprints and fingerprints; breath fogging up glass – and the indelible emotional imprints too, the love that remains long after the beloved person has gone. (Anita Sethi, The Guardian)
A highly original, engrossing literary thriller … Sheers is a writer with a sharp eye for both the big picture and the lovely detail. (Kirkus Starred Review)
Owen Sheers is a writer whose great gifts and imagination are on full display in I Saw a Man – a commodious and mesmerizing exploration of guilt and sorrow and the tangled web woven out of our lies. (Louis Begley)
Owen Sheers is an exquisite and exceptional talent. He navigates terrain that is both globally complex and crushingly intimate — all with a poet’s quiet grace. Spectacular. This book is a prize in itself. (Alison Wearing)
Publishers:
English USA: Doubleday US
English Canada: Random House Canada
Dutch: Ambo Uitgevers
Danish: Gylendalske Boghandel
Spanish: Random House Spain
French: Editions Payot-Rivages
German: Deutsche Verlags-Anstatt
Hebrew: Keter Publishing House
UK Retailers:
Foyles
Waterstones
www.amazon .co.uk