Transcription
Published by: Granta Books
A gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store – or to erase – our memories.
A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor.
But after he drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device – a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.
Read an extract from the book here.
Our judges said:
Transcription is slender, masterful novel which tells a vivid and involving story about three people’s relationships with each other at around the time one of them chooses to end his life. As well as being a wry and intimate study of various kinds of love and admiration, it is also a novel about the place of recording and broadcasting technology in all our lives. As states and individuals struggle to respond to the altered, screen-dominated fabric of our world, Transcription articulates some of the central issues of our time with all the subtlety, indirection, and philosophical resonance which is the hallmark of fiction at its best."
