Description
After the death of his child, a man – disconnected, lost, unable to sleep – explores the absence at the
heart of life.
Gathering accounts of trauma and loss from the lives of people and places, past and present: of Isadora
Duncan, Ana Mendietta, WG Sebald and Pier Paolo Pasolini; of a car crash, a fall from a skyscraper, the
photographs of a murderer, a journey to The Gate of the Kiss; he travels through a landscape of halfremembered events and lost works of art, attempting to fathom lives pieced together from borrowed
and fragmentary stories of history, memory and existence; trying to recover his own life.
Part fiction, part essay, part meditation on absence and grief, A Certain Slant of Light is a profound and
moving attempt to trace the connections, however unlikely and strange, between art, history and life.
A unique and beautiful book, profusely illustrated, A Certain Slant of Light was shortlisted for the
Fitzcarraldo Prize.
“Duncan White’s moving novel reverberates with unspoken grief. A beautifully written
meditation on impermanence, in which art and human life are seen as signal flares into the
darkness.”
Howard Cunnell, Fathers and Sons, The Painter’s Friend
