OK, Mr Field

A pianist has an accident and is forced to abandon his career. He and his wife move to South Africa to live in a house he has developed an obsession with-a house built by a South African architect inspired by Le Corbusier. Within weeks of arriving, Mr Field's wife inexplicably leaves him, to which he has responds with curious lassitude. But in this house on the South African coast (Corbusier's 'machine for living'), some shifts are triggered in its sole occupant. The sequences of spaces in which he lives, which seem to lead towards and away from their destinations at once, mirror his feeling that the things he yearns for are always getting further and further out of reach. But the house's most potent effect on Mr Field is its conjuring up of Hannah Kallenbach, its prior inhabitant, whom he begins to stalk.

With a rare, scintillating and poetic eye, Katharine Kilalea conveys some of the deepest human emotion in the most curious of details. OK Mr Field is one of the most unusual and vital works of literature to be published on the Faber list in years.“Dazzling. . . . Luminous. . . . As with much of Beckett’s writing, OK, Mr. Field
is often bleakly comic. But at moments it is also tender (without being
sentimental), depicting the strange dream-like inner life of someone
who is terribly lonely. . . . OK, Mr. Field introduces a striking new voice in fiction.” —The Economist“Strikingly original.” —The Guardian"A startlingly good first novel. . . . as uncanny as Kafka or Beckett." —The Spectator“Enthralling.
. . .Kilalea’s impressionistic prose invites comparison to the
attentive introspection of Woolf, the existential erosion of Beckett and
the reveries of Proust. . . .This is an unforgettable voyage, slip
sliding away into the unknown and unknowable.” —Seattle Times"Enigmatic, often dream-like and brilliantly funny." —The Irish Times"Kilalea's striking, singular debut. . . . is a disorienting and enthralling descent into one man's particular malaise." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A
bewitching debut novel . . . with prose of this quality it is hard to
protest, and Mr Field is in any case good company—irascible and weird,
but endearing in his attempts to duck the loneliness waiting for him at
every turn." —The Sunday Times"In a spare and
inventive first novel, poet Katharine Kilalea breathes life into a
lonely, flummoxed man in search of a metaphysical place to hang his
hat." —Shelf Awareness“One of the most original,
beautifully written and convincing works of fiction I have read in a
long time, with a narrative that is mysterious yet compulsive. Utterly
marvelous.” —George Szirtes, author of Bad Machine   “OK, Mr. Field is
a novel brave in its own intelligence and subtlety. The writing is
quietly beautiful and the narrator’s voice strange and compelling.” —Sarah Moss, author of The Tidal Zone  
“Katharine Kilalea is to literature what ceramic knives are to cookery.
This is a whole new type of writing and it will cut through
everything.” —Emily Berry, author of Stranger, Baby“OK, Mr. Field is a beautiful novel—deeply felt, inventive, and inspiring in its form, insights, and originality.” —Yasmine El Rashidi, author of Chronicle of a Last Summer

Katharine Kilalea grew up in South Africa and moved to London for
an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She has
published a poetry collection, One Eye'd Leigh, which was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She lives in London.