Alice Thompson (born in Edinburgh) is a Scottish novelist.[1][2][3][4]

Thompson was educated at St George's School, Edinburgh,[5] then read English at Oxford University and wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Henry James. In the 1980s she was the keyboard player with rock band The Woodentops.[5] She has a son, and lives in Edinburgh. Her novel Justine was the joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize.[6] She also won a Creative Scotland Award[6] in 2000, and was a Writer in Residence in Shetland.[7]

Novels

  • Killing Time (1990) - novella
  • Justine (1996)
  • Pandora's Box (1998)
  • Pharos: A Ghost Story (2002)
  • The Falconer (2008)
  • The Existential Detective (2010)
  • Burnt Island (2013)
  • The Book Collector (2015)

Critical reception

"Their romance had been like a fairytale. If only she could work out which fairytale it was, it would somehow help her." Will it be The Red Shoes, whose heroine is danced to death, punished by her worldly thoughts, or Mr Fox, whose wife is enjoined to "Be bold, be bold, but not too bold"? Or maybe it's a modern tale, such as Rebecca, with its saturnine hero obsessed with a dead wife and a ghastly secret."

"THERE is a distinctive ambience to an Alice Thompson novel. From Justine, her debut which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, through Pandora's Box, Pharos, The Falconer, The Existential Detective and Burnt Island, there is a kind of gothic postmodernism."

"A genuinely eerie tale, in a perfect setting and told with just the right amount of ambiguity."[8]

"Some books evoke a particular piece of music, others, a particular color. The Falconer (2008) by Alice Thompson reminded me of a painting in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery, which fascinated me as a child. The Fairy Raid (1867) by Scottish pre-Raphaelite Noel Paton depicts a fairy caravan traveling through a grove with a bounty of stolen children, having left changelings in their stead. It's an enchanting, overtly romantic work, but death and duplicity hide in the shadows, symbolizing the Victorian fear of high childhood mortality."[9]

References

  1. ↑ "Alice Thompson: The Scottish Review of Books Interview" Archived 23 December 2009 at the Wayback Machine, Scottish Review of Books. Accessed 16 December 2010.
  2. ↑ Holcombe, Garan. "Alice Thompson" Archived 6 June 2014 at the Wayback Machine, British Council. Accessed 24 September 2011.
  3. ↑ "Review: The Book Collector, by Alice Thompson". www.yorkshirepost.co.uk. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  4. ↑ Feay, Suzi (17 December 2015). "The Book Collector by Alice Thompson review – elegant and shocking entertainment". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  5. 1 2 Alice Thompson discovers island life | Herald Scotland Retrieved 7 Jan 2014.
  6. 1 2 Salt. "Author: Alice Thompson". Salt. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  7. ↑ "Alice Thompson - Literature". literature.britishcouncil.org. Retrieved 24 November 2017.
  8. ↑ PHAROS by Alice Thompson | Kirkus Reviews.
  9. ↑ "The Falconer by Alice Thompson". Retrieved 24 November 2017.
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