Brian
Jeremy Cooper
Perennially on the outside, Brian has led a solitary life; he works at Camden Council, lunches every day at Il Castelletto café and then returns to his small flat on Kentish Town Road. It is an existence carefully crafted to avoid disturbance and yet Brian yearns for more. A visit one day to the BFI brings film into his life, and Brian introduces a new element to his routine: nightly visits to the cinema on London’s South Bank. Through the works of Yasujirō Ozu, Federico Fellini, Agnès Varda, Yilmaz Güney and others, Brian gains access to a rich cultural landscape outside his own experience, but also achieves his first real moments of belonging, accepted by a curious bunch of amateur film buffs, the small informal group of BFI regulars. A tender meditation on friendship and the importance of community, Brian is also a tangential work of film criticism, one that is not removed from its subject matter, but rather explores with great feeling how art gives meaning to and enriches our lives.
Prospect Books of the Year 2023
‘Easily the best novel I’ve read this decade.’
— Olivia Laing, Guardian
‘Brian is affecting, funny and, at 184 pages, a skilfully compressed chronicle of one man’s life and the cornucopia of film that enriches it.’
— Max Liu, Financial Times
‘[The] novel’s celebration of ordinariness and anonymity … it’s a quiet and even melancholic vision …Cooper gives us chronology without event, people without relationships, art without identification, agglomeration without purpose. And so we are forced to focus on what’s left – the structure of a life story, mediated through art, but not redeemed by it.’
— Clair Wills, New York Review of Books
‘What makes Jeremy Cooper’s seventh novel appealing and convincing is the author’s serene prose and tender, understated empathy…. This is an affectionate, thoughtful portrait of a gentle soul.’
— David Collard, Times Literary Supplement
Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of six previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum’s catalogue of artists’ postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC’s Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Novel Prize for Ash before Oak.
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