Love Notes From A German Building Site (Winner Of John Mcgah

Description: Paul, a young Irish engineer, follows Evelyn to Berlin and begins work on the renovation of a commercial building in Alexanderplatz. Wrestling with a new language, on a site running behind schedule, and with a relationship in flux, he becomes increasingly untethered. Set against the structural evolution of a sprawling city, this meditation on language, memory and yearning is underpinned by the site's physical reality. As the narrator explores the mind's fragile architecture, he begins to map his own strange geography through a series of notebooks, or 'Love notes'. Paul's story will speak to anyone who has known what it is to be in love, or exiled, or simply alone

Review: 'Love Notes from a German Building Site is a strange, oblique, haunted work of quiet meditative intelligence ... some of the finest writing on love I've read in recent memory.' -ROB DOYLE, AUTHOR OF HeRe ARe THe YouNG MeN 'The best book I have read in years - it contains that magical balance of mastery and uncertainty and recklessness that creates something new in literature ... a perfect depiction of love, and of desire and struggle.' -GREG BAXTER, AUTHOR OF A PRePARATioN FoR DeATH 'With elegance and precision, this beautiful book shows the forces that act on the structures of buildings and those that impact on relationships.' -WENDY ERSKINE, AUTHOR OF SWeeT HoMe
At the heart of the novel is the question of language, German as a set of signs, but also the world itself as a set of signs waiting to be interpreted by the protagonist, who is created in this book with an acute and painstaking emotional accuracy. -- Colm Toibin
Adrian Duncan's quietly reflective novel brings to life an engineer's work in Berlin. -- Sarah Gilmartin * The Irish Times *
This book is an excellent and a daring debut. Daring, because of the unconventional narrative style filled with meditations and well-meaning digressions. The notes and musings wrap themselves like cotton candy around the plot, which, like the stick, holds it together while being the least important aspect. -- Shrinidhi Kalwad * Dublin Inquirer *
What Duncan presents in his short novel is a wonderfully-crafted, beautifully-blended hybrid. -- Grace Keane * RTE *

Prizes: Winner of John McGahern Annual Book Prize 2019 (Ireland). Short-listed for Dalkey Emerging Writer Award 2020 (Ireland).

Author Biography: Adrian Duncan is a Berlin-based Irish visual artist who originally trained as a structural engineer. His shortform fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, gorse, The Moth, The Dublin Review and Meridian (US), among others. His feature film on Irish engineer Peter Rice, codirected with Feargal Ward, will be released in 2019.