The Carp Castle

This brilliant unpublished novel was only recently discovered in the (deceased) author’s papers. “It’s a delight. It could be by no-one else — the combination of effortless technical detail and delicate emotional perception is utterly MacDonald Harris, and so is his sense, marvellously deployed here, of the simultaneous tenderness and absurdity of love. His sympathy for such a range of characters in their crazinesses, their various kinds of loneliness, their sheer comedy is wonderful. I think it’s one of his very best; what a pity he didn’t live to see it published.” — Philip Pullman MacDonald Harris’s novel is set in the 1920s against a backdrop of airships, mysticism, erotic love and a Europe that is picking itself up after WW1. The narrative is so richly imagined that the reader cannot help but be propelled along with the extraordinary characters who make up the crew and passengers aboard the League of Nations airship. The Carp Castle was completed shortly before the author’s death in 1993 and then seems to have disappeared. Its re-emergence follows the very successful re-publication of Harris’s most successful book The Balloonist, which left critics asking for more, and is part of the renaissance of this immensely talented writer who had such a huge and enthusiastic following during his lifetime.