Broken Consort
‘We are taught by what we find . . .’
‘“Who do I think I am, wandering about looking for the links between things?”, asks Will Eaves in these rich essays drawn from a career as an editor and critic, novelist and teacher of creative writing. A broken consort, in Renaissance music, is an ensemble in which instruments from different families are combined. Eaves’s roaming ear is reliably true, setting up harmonies between subjects as various as Homer’s lonely Odysseus (“adrift, he is ‘no one everywhere’”) and Ian Fleming’s equally lonely James Bond, whose violent moral code “disqualifies him from enjoying its social benefits”. Thoughts about “the associative impulse” at work in literary fiction sit easily alongside musings on the “fairy-tale family economy” of James and the Giant Peach. You’re reminded of T. S. Eliot’s ideal poet – and Eaves is a poet, too – in whose imagination disparate experiences are always forming new wholes. ’
– Elizabeth Lowry, Times Literary Supplement, 2020
Read More
Shop Now
Murmur
‘The world is coming out of trance . . .’
‘The narrator of Murmur is a mathematician and computer pioneer in pre-1960s Britain. Sentenced to hormone therapy for the “crime” of being gay, Alec Pryor is very obviously standing in for the computer genius and codebreaker Alan Turing. The book is a disorientating and hallucinatory exploration of a mind warped by the oestrogen medication stilboestrol, the treatment forced on Turing. An extraordinary exploration of dreams, consciousness, science and the future.’
– Rowan Hooper, New Scientist Books of the Year
Read More
Shop Now
News
The Absent Therapist, audio adaptation performed by the author with original music, produced by Bibi Berki and Mark Lingwood for Tempest Productions. Listen to it, here: https://soundcloud.com/user-986948053/the-absent-therapist
Murmur, three-part television adaptation, commissioned from the author by Severn Screen; producer, Ed Talfan; executive producers, Stephen Fry and Will Eaves
Rathbone Folio Prize Mentor, 2021–22
New short fiction in Brixton Review of Books #15, Autumn 2021; Nightjar Press, 2022
Visiting Research Fellow, Merton College, Oxford, 2020
The Neuromantics podcast, with Prof Sophie Scott, receives Arts Council funding for Season 2
Brixton Review of Books 15 OUT NOW. Subscribe for a tenner, here