Tell

Curtis Doyle, a self-made businessman and art collector, has vanished from his palatial home in the Scottish Highlands. In the wake of his disappearance, the woman who worked as his gardener is interviewed for a possible film about her employer. A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s.

‘For the reader, it is as if we have our ear pressed against a keyhole, listening, or are flies on a wall, witnessing events that seem to portend some momentous revelation about a man. Tell is a relentlessly truthful and absorbing tale about the human condition and a searing account of the complexity of life in the modern world. Employing the simplest of narrative devices but used in the most innovative ways, Jonathan Buckley has produced a profound work of fiction.’
— Xiaolu Guo, 2024 Goldsmiths Prize Judge

‘Buckley has once again staged an absorbing debate: a philosophical refusal of narrative linearity that is replete with stories; a constellation of episodes that does not tell the whole tale.’
— Richard Robinson, Guardian

‘Given that so many of Buckley’s novels are concerned with ideas of memory, selfhood and storytelling, this is hardly new territory for him. Yet the interview conceit in Tell makes it feel fresh, the withholding of interiority requiring an unusual engagement. Don’t take the conversational prose at face value; underneath it lies a whole other set of mysteries besides Curtis’s. Pay attention and you’ll find them.’
— George Cochrane, Financial Times

‘Always well crafted, this novel is engaging in parts and digressive in others, which adds to its realism, capturing how people chatter their way down alleys, rarely hewing to the main road of a tale…. The buildup in Tell is perpetual, a sense that an explanation must be coming. But the author diverges from expectations and converges on reality, where remembering is not the same as understanding. Abruptly, someone may just disappear, and all that remains is the sight of a figure wandering across a bridge – no splash heard, just the fading ripples of “why.”’
— Tom Rachman, New York Times

‘Buckley … asks readers to think about how and why stories are told. This self-reflexivity results in a thought-provoking, artfully constructed narrative enriched by the mysteries that expand and proliferate throughout. It’s a deliciously fraught tour de force.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘[A] riveting thriller that sweeps you in from the off…. Buckley’s prose is unpretentious and engrossing, weaving in a constant sense of foreboding that proves irresistible.’
— Martha Alexander, AnOther Magazine

‘Tell, the remarkable new novel by Jonathan Buckley … is concerned with assessment and measurement. Any sort of precision, it suggests, is fundamentally at odds with the business of storytelling…. Buckley has succeeded in developing an aesthetic of slightness: his is writing designed to slip by unobtrusively, marked by hesitations and ellipses. He gives the reader glancing versions of a character or event while questioning the possibility of telling a story at all.’
— Julia Jordan, Literary Review

Praise for Jonathan Buckley

‘Exactly why Buckley is not already revered and renowned as a novelist in the great European tradition remains a mystery that will perhaps only be addressed at that final godly hour when all the overlooked authors working in odd and antique modes will receive their just rewards.’
— Ian Sansom, Times Literary Supplement

‘Buckley’s fiction is subtle and fastidiously low-key … every apparently loose thread, when tugged, reveals itself to be woven into the themes [and] gets better the more you allow it to settle in your mind.’
— Michel Faber, Guardian

‘Few writers manage to conjure such raw unease as Jonathan Buckley … completely compelling.’
— Adrian Turpin, Financial Times

‘Why isn’t Jonathan Buckley better known? His novel of love, death and melancholy comedy, The Great Concert of the Night, is captivating.’
— John Banville

Jonathan Buckley is a writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton. In 2015 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘Briar Road’, and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His previous novel, Tell, was the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, a global, biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize. One Boat is his thirteenth novel, the second to come out with Fitzcarraldo Editions.