David Rose

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Biographical note:  David Rose was born in 1949, living outside West London, between Windsor and Richmond. He spent his working life in the Post Office. His debut story was published in The Literary Review, and since then, has been widely published in small presses in the U.K. and Canada. He is joint owner and Fiction Editor of Main Street Journal.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781907773112
ISBN:  9781907773112
Author:  David Rose
Title:  Vault
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FA
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Mar-11
Extent:  168pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  252 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  A man has had his life story turned into a novel, without his knowledge or approval. As he now reads, comments on and corrects the novel, he begins to struggle to distance himself from the false heroics, and above all, to reclaim his own death.

Main description:  A pre-war amateur cycling career is cut short by call-up. Trained as a sniper, the man, whose name we never know for sure, embarks for war-torn Europe. Undecided how to resume his life at the war’s close, and disturbed by what he has left behind on the Continent, he is compelled to return, dispensing first medical aid, then something quite different.

A further attempt to take up his cycling career is thwarted when he is inveigled into playing his minor part in a new – Cold – war. Finally settling for a retreat into peaceful obscurity, he discovers even this is not to be.

His story, he learns, has been turned into a novel. without his knowledge or approval. As he now reads, comments on and corrects the novel, he begins to struggle to distance himself from the false heroics, and above all, to reclaim his own death.

Table of contents:
Contents
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Acknowledgments

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Excerpt from book:  

Unpublished endorsement:  In recent years every magazine worth its salt has featured a David Rose short story. Although bewilderingly various and multiphonic they were always unmistakably him… Now comes Vault, a strange, spare tale of army snipers, nuclear espionage and competition cycling. The Tour de France features but this is closer to Flann O’Brien or Alfred Jarry than Lance Armstrong, with its shifting narrators continually mutinying against their creator – Rose, God or themselves. Although it has the drive of a Len Deighton thriller it also contrives to be simultaneously playful and tragic, giddily comic and heartbreakingly sad, making one suspect that there are no limits to what this writer may do

Bill Broady, author of The Swimmer (Flamingo, 2000)