Description

‘An utterly distinctive voice in contemporary Irish literature’ IRISH TIMES
‘One of our most original writers’IRISH INDEPENDENT

Summer, 1923. Six-year-old Catherine Carolan grows restless on her parents’ farm. It’s already clear that her intellect will soon outgrow the two-room schoolhouse across the fields. But in post-Civil War Ireland, an education is not an easy thing for a girl to access, and young Catherine is not the only one in her family who will come to tire of rural life.

Summer, 1951. To ease him through his final days, Dr. Josef Alois calls for someone from his past. Enter Catherine Carolan, now an Oxford professor. As Alois’s mind and body falter, Catherine must decide how far she will follow this man that she loves.

A novel in two strands, A Thought without Collision is a beautiful meditation on how we construct our relationship to the world around us.

‘Duncan offers a different model of novelistic causality, with characters that feel alive in their vivid and quiet complexity’ SUSANNAH DICKEY
‘Very moving, very funny, it will make your brain dance’ JO LLOYD
‘An original voice, a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms’ COLM TOIBIN

Publisher Review

Adrian Duncan’s account of a mathematical prodigy and the characters who shape her life is for me his best work yet. The dual timelines build into a compelling enquiry into how we perceive and affect the world that we pass through. It’s very moving, very funny, and it will make your brain dance — Jo Lloyd I was so impressed and moved by this novel. With formal innovation and elegant, blistering prose, Duncan offers a different model of novelistic causality, with characters that feel alive in their vivid and quiet complexity — Susannah Dickey The book is an elegant rarity in contemporary fiction: a novel in which form, voice, style and story are inseparable from each other. — Cathy Sweeney Praise for Adrian Duncan * – * One of the most important and intriguing writers working now * Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy * Uncanny, strange and exquisite, akin to the fictions of Laszlo Krasznahorkai * Financial Times * I was so impressed and moved by this novel. A Thought Without Collision manages to seamlessly intersperse fascinating passages of mathematical philosophy with encounters of profound human tenderness, asking questions of what, exactly, it is that makes us human: the messy, tearaway nature of our thoughts? Our yearning for sense-making? Or the uncontrollable and yet transformative points of connection between us? With formal innovation and elegant, blistering prose, Duncan offers a different model of novelistic causality, with characters that feel alive in their vivid and quiet complexity — Susannah Dickey