Patrick Wright

While the narrator mourns his lost love, reminiscing through the streets of Manchester, he imagines where she is: living by the sea with her mad sister, trying to make a small utopia away from memories of the past and civilization. First telling the story of a friendship that ends in heartbreak, Things Of Infinite Beauty moves on to a relationship between sisters, a society of two in a remote and reclusive beach hut. Can the sisters find peace and fulfilment, accepting the limitations of their love for each other, and the ones left behind, or will the past haunt them with its trauma and regret, threatening to destroy the fragile world they’ve created?

 A daring synthesis of meditation and memoir, Fallen Pictures explores the incomprehensibility of death and the relationship that endures, with a loved one, in the void left behind. Written largely in poetic prose and second person prayer-like incantations, the dark surrealist narrative charts a progressive psychical retreat, from the trauma of the cancer ward, and ghosts that haunt the empty house, to imaginative excursions in photographs, childhood memories and dreams. Through his bouts of depression and insomnia, centred upon his mother’s death, the author finds no easy answers to the timeless questions of transience, the afterlife, loss, and existential anxiety – themes that will no doubt appeal to all readers who’ve lost someone precious in their life.