Fiction

Richard Price is represented by The McKernan Agency for his fiction.

A Boy in Summer, 11:9, 2002 Buy this book

A collection of linked short stories which gradually build up to become an "elliptical novel", a layered evocation of a Scottish community from the 1960s to the present day. Highlights include a peculiar game with a BMW, a hapless kidnap attempt, a snowy journey towards a honeymoon, love on the day of LiveAid, and, at the heart of the book, delicate recreations of childhood. This is one of the books in which the Hydro Hotel appears, the location "Renfrewshwhere".

"With R. J. Price there is a rare and precious stasis, a sense of otherness and the gift of insinuation. Of leaving more out than is on the page. Ghosts invisible; ever present. In the best of the stories - which are exquisite - such as "A Room Full of Botticellis", "The Last Day" and "Answers to an Interview", the detail illuminates character. Age range, too, is beautifully handled, as are relationships, the unspoken bonds between sons and hero fathers, between the older and younger self, the melt of time, the lure of place. There's a sense that these stories have been gestated over a period of years. The west of Scotland's small town essence, its urban borderlands of the mind, have rarely been better brought to life or better mapped in shades of loss." - Tom Adair, The Scotsman

All texts unless otherwise stated © Richard Price