Central
Fiction
Paperback | 168 pages | Published by the Lonely Coot in 2015 in a limited edition of 250
“It’ll take more than angels.”
When Georgia places the keys to an empty house on Bloomsbury Square into the hands of her friend Jacob, he doesn't know what to think. "We can live here,” she says. “For free."
But he isn't allowed to ask any questions.
A few days later the two of them are living in central London — soon joined by Georgia's friend Lukas, his old mate Olayemi, and a stranger called Alex.
What drives them to stop leaving the house? And what happens when they do?
Central is haunted by demons and, maybe, visited by angels. Its meaning lurks between the lines, and echoes, faintly, from what has been cut — in a feverish attempt to arrive at some kind of truth. This strange story of a London rebellion is both pure and puzzling.
…or a bookshop near you.
Years later, I will write about Central: Nothing — for months. ‘What will be gained from attempting another novel?’ I ask my notebook, again and again. When the prose of Anne Michaels comes to me, decades delayed — like a hand on my shoulder —, something opens up again. One after the other, characters arrive, and they insist, and I’m reluctant, but I say Yes, and, for the next three years, this demon-haunted story set in an empty house on Bloomsbury Square is the force that keeps me going, and the force that drives me to the edge: I isolate completely, endanger relationships, lose sight and perspective. Out of money, but unable to give up on what I started, I move back into the basement of my parents. When, at last, the Lonely Coot takes the manuscript out of my hands, I don’t know what to feel. When I'm placing the book into the hands of readers now, often I still don't. But Central had to happen, and I'm glad it did. In a letter to me, Anne Michaels writes: ‘This purity is a kind of oxygen.’
View from the house that served as the model for the story’s setting. I lived here, as a property guardian, for several months in 2012.
Support your local bookshop.