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On the windswept front of Morecambe Bay, Cy Parks spends his childhood years first in a guest house for consumptives run by his mother and then as apprentice to alcoholic tattoo-artist Eliot Riley. Thirsty for new experiences, he departs for America and finds himself in the riotous world of the Coney Island boardwalk, where he sets up his own business as ‘The Electric Michelangelo’. In this carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak-shows, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious immigrant and circus performer who commissions him to cover her entire body in tattooed eyes.
Hugely atmospheric, exotic and familiar, The Electric Michelangelo is a love story and an exquisitely rendered portrait of seaside resorts on opposite sides of the Atlantic by one of the most uniquely talented novelists of her generation.
'The torrential Lawrentian flow of her prose offers many heady pleasures.'
'A vivid depiction of changing seaside culture on both sides of the Atlantic, and a smart study of a subtle but desreputable art.'
'Her gorgeously embellished prose compels the narrative, along with the beguiling vignettes she conjures up...... the effect is intoxicating.'
'Sarah Hall's second novel, is richly descriptive, an evocative exploration of misfits and exiles searching for a home.'
'Confirms her status as one of the most significant and exciting of our younger novelists ... The Electric Michelangelo is a work of unusual imaginative power and range, and it deserves a wide readership.'
'Hall is a writer to indulge, and her sensuous, poetic prose is every bit as evocative as sand poured from a pocket at the end of a holiday.'
Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. Twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize, she is the award-winning author of six novels and three short-story collections: The Beautiful Indifference, which won the Edge Hill and Portico prizes, Madame Zero, winner of the East Anglian Book Award, and Sudden Traveller, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. She is currently…
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