Max Gate

by Damien Wilkins

Overview

Fiction finalist 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards

Who owns us when we're gone? Thomas Hardy's friends and family fight over his legacy (and mortal remains).

'Lyrical... beautifully crafted' New Zealand Herald

The story of Thomas Hardy’s death told by his housemaid Nellie. 1928. As Thomas Hardy lies on his death bed at his Dorset home, Max Gate, a tug-of-war is taking place over his legacy... and the eventual fate of his mortal remains. What counts for more: the wishes of his family and dutiful second wife, Florence? the opinion of his literary friends? Hardy’s own express desires? or ‘the will of the nation’? 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910709139
Publisher:	Gallic Books Limited
Publication date:	07/12/2016
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	7.80(w) x 5.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Damien Wilkins is one of New Zealand’s leading writers, the author of seven novels, including the New Zealand Book Award-winning The Miserables, and The Fainter, which was shortlisted for both the Montana New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. In 2013 he became the Director of the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. Wilkins completed his MFA at Washington University and won a Whiting Award in 1992. 

Editorial Reviews

Damien Wilkins…has made the inspired decision in Max Gate to imagine the last week of Hardy's life and to tell the story in the voice of Hardy's real-life housemaid, Nellie Titterington, whose vitality practically vaults off the page while her master's strength ebbs away upstairs. The result is a wonderful and truthful portrait of Hardy (though he never leaves his sickroom) and an extraordinary descent into the loveless prison of his marriage.

The New York Times Book Review - Max Byrd

Fiction finalist 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards

'Max Gate is superbly attuned to that tremulous moment just before everything changes forever – the Hardy household, the known world of domestic servitude and dutiful women. Damien Wilkins, who writes fabulous prose, is a wise and imaginative guide to this fascinating terrain. He has created that wondrous thing, a novel that surprises and delights at every turn' Michelle de Kretser

Lyrical ... beautifully crafted ... As Hardy is lauded as one of the finest English writers, Wilkins is one of New Zealand's great wordsmiths' New Zealand Herald

Praise for Damien Wilkins:

'Mr. Wilkins can command a breathtakingly supple literary style' New York Times

'Remarkable talent for setting scenes and sketching characters ... a tour de force display of a deep and abiding literary gift and marks Wilkins as a young novelist of extraordinary promise' Publishers Weekly

'A witty and sentient writer' LA Times

From the Publisher

★ 2016-05-03
The final days of novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, as related by his wry, perceptive housemaid.Hardy is dying at Max Gate, his house in Dorset, and the people around him are trying to maintain his comfort while planning the curation of his public image. The goings-on are narrated by shrewd housemaid Nellie Titterington, a deliciously Hardy-esque name which author Wilkins (Somebody Loves Us All, 2010, etc.) notes in an afterword he discovered during his research. Hardy, "adored by the nation," is less beloved than merely catered to at home, attended by his literary executor Sydney Cockerell, friend Sir James Barrie, and much younger secretary-turned-second-wife Florence. It's 1928, and it isn't only Hardy that's passing on, but also his Victorian morals, his style of novel, and his way of pigeonholing women—one of whom, his first wife, Emma, fared better as a dead muse than a living spouse. "Did he know just a single female—his mother or sisters, or some little girl from his childhood?" wonders Nellie. "We are just shapes to fill in a jigsaw." Nellie leaps backward to relate her brief dalliance with a local reporter who romanced her only to dig for information on the great man and forward to hint at a future life of domestic contentment and even, ingeniously, into the head of the unhappy lady of the house, Florence, in tour-de-force stream-of-consciousness sections in which Nellie briefly imagines the world from her perspective. In the voices of unforgettable, feisty Nellie and forlorn, forbearing Florence, Wilkins tells more than the story at hand, raising questions as to whose voice is granted authority in a narrative and how a legend is remembered. The death of a literary giant liberates a marginalized member of his household into claiming her destiny in her own unique, dazzling words.

Kirkus Reviews