Feast Days. Ian Mackenzie

       Copyright

      4th Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thEstate.co.uk

      This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

      Copyright © Ian MacKenzie 2018

      Cover design by Heike Schüssler

      Cover images © plainpicture/Goto-Foto/Tracy Jean Shields

      Ian MacKenzie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

      Source ISBN: 9780008298548

      Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008306540

      Version: 2019-01-31

       Praise

      ‘This brilliant novel has no time for platitudes or conventional, ankle-deep morality; it plunges us straight to the depths. I’m not sure I know another book that feels at once so disaffected and so full of longing, so expansive in its sympathy and so terrifying in its candour. Devastating, funny and wise, it’s among the best novels I know about the fate of American innocence abroad’

      GARTH GREENWELL

      ‘There is a sly, brooding intelligence at work in this novel, recalling for me the startling, highest times in American literature. MacKenzie is not just a great writer in the making – he’s already there’

      BRAD WATSON

      ‘A beautiful, wry and honest exploration of belonging and not-belonging. The sharpness and precision with which the story is told reminded me in parts of Maggie Nelson … the prose is stunning’

      SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

      ‘Brilliant. A pervasive sense of unrest, both large and small scale, social and personal, [is] conveyed in MacKenzie’s unruffled, discerning prose. MacKenzie has captured one of the most memorable narrative voices in recent fiction’

       Publishers Weekly

      ‘Intelligent and atmospheric, Feast Days deftly limns the inner life of a foreigner whose own trajectory becomes increasingly bound up with the tensions and complexities of the society in which she has landed’

      CHLOE ARIDJIS

      ‘Poignant and perceptive’

       Booklist

      ‘The novel of the ugly American living abroad has bloomed into a genre all its own … Charles Portis’s Gringos, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper … Ian MacKenzie’s second novel arrives as a worthy addition to that list’

       New York Times

      ‘A story about love and power, luxury and empire, set in one of the most socially stratified countries on the planet. MacKenzie’s slender novel feels heavier than many novels twice its weight’

       San Francisco Chronicle

       Dedication

       For Kelsey—

       first reader of everything,

       fixes the mistakes no one else has to see

       Epigraph

      “Oh,” I said, putting my hat on. “Oh.”

       —Mark Strand,

       “I Will Love the Twenty-first Century”