John Fuller

WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD PRIZE AND SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE. John Fuller's first novel opens with the arrival of church agent Vane on a remote Welsh island where he is to investigate the disappearance of pilgrims visiting its sacred well. While Vane looks for clues and corpses the local Abbot seaches for the location of the soul. Magical and poetic, Flying to Nowhere awakens our secret hopes and fears and our need to believe in miracles.

Flying To Nowhere

A bizarre and disturbing novel written in prose of such clarity and descriptive power as to make the characters and the happenstance arise from the open pages like a demonic and gothic pop-up book. There is an Abbot, living in a strange, labyrinthine and changeable abbey on a small island which appears to be Welsh. He is obsessed with finding the seat of the human soul, dissecting the deceased to uncover its location, a location always seeming out of reach. The Novices in his charge and the girls who live on the nearby farm are entwined, not only in the usual business of life, but both take part in a form of sexualised torture which purports to set the Novices on the path to ordination. Meanwhile a scion of the Bishop lands to investigate the vanishment of any number of pilgrims, who have visited the island to partake of the sacred and miraculous waters from the Sainted well. There are gruesome deaths (one of which begins this narrow novel), grisly goings-on, mad monk experiments and initiations, even the earliest blossoming of romance. All in 105 dense but glorious pages. And the waters? Can they really stave off illness, postpone death, bring the departed back to life…? Of course, but not in the way you might expect. I felt the shades of Mary Shelley and every Brontë at my shoulder as I read. I could also imagine Jeff VanderMeer nodding in approval as I read on.

Flying To Nowhere

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