Schopenhauer's Telescope

Gerald Donovan’s chilling narrative about civil war. In a field in Europe, two men are separated by a deepening grave. But only one of them is digging.

In an unnamed European village, in the middle of a civil war, one man digs while another watches over him. Gradually, they begin to talk. Over the course of the afternoon, as the snow falls and truck-loads of villagers are corralled in the next field, we discover why they are there - not just who they are and how sinister events in their country have led them to be separated by a deepening grave, but why the history of civilization is inseparable from the history of mass violence.

"Two men, one digging a hole, the other watching and talking, lay out the history of man’s cruelty to man... The same can be said of the novel as a whole. Donovan has many interesting ideas about the permanent bloody stains on Europe’s conscience and the evils that men do, but he’s not yet accomplished enough to convey them effectively. Overconstructed but intermittently superb: an ambitious if flawed debut from a promising writer."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Gerard Donovan is an acclaimed Irish-born novelist, photographer and poet, working as a lecturer at the University of Plymouth. Donovan attracted immediate critical acclaim with his debut novel Schopenhauer's Telescope, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. His subsequent novels include Doctor Salt (2005), Julius Winsome (2006), and, most recently, Sunless (2007).