The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel Author: Visit Amazon's Justin Go Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1476704589 | Format: PDF
The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel Description
Review
“Justin Go has written an astonishingly vast, meticulously plotted, and beautifully told novel. In elegant, haunting prose he tells a wartime story that is at once violent and lovely, hopeful and despairing. I won’t soon forget Go’s passionate, star-crossed lovers and their deeply moving story, set against the riveting, utterly realistic backdrop of the Great War.” (Anton DiSclafani)
“A wonderful time-slip story, beautifully written with a superb sense of place. Go captures the spirit of early 20th-century England perfectly, both in the past and the present, in a novel that is exciting, emotionally engaging and ambitious. I loved it!” (Kate Mosse)
“Ambitious…this is a remarkable work.” (Booklist)
"Go’s debut is ambitious in many ways...it depicts a love that transcends time and disdains convention; and it fluidly moves between past and present." (
Publishers Weekly)
“Go’s intriguing first novel spans the 20th century… with vivid accounts of wartime France, pioneering mountaineering expeditions, and an isolated village in Iceland.” (BBC.com)
About the Author
Justin Go attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated with a BA in history and art history. He also holds an MA in English from University College London. He has lived in Tokyo, Paris, London, New York City, and Berlin. He is currently at work on his second novel.
- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 15, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1476704589
- ISBN-13: 978-1476704586
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.5 inches
- Shipping Information: View shipping rates and policies
It's the late 19990s and Tristan Campbell has just finished up his university degree in art and history. Returning home to his shared apartment, Tristan finds an old-style, fine stationary letter from Twyning & Hooper, Solicitors, London asking him to give them a call at his earliest convenience. Intrigued, Tristan walks to the nearest pay phone and calls them collect. Seems the firm is executor to a rather extraordinary trust set up in 1916 whose assets have yet to be fully distributed. After verifying some personal data, the solicitor on the other end of the phone asks him to fly to London on their dollar and meet with them in person.
Being at loose ends, Tristan agrees if no other reason than to see one of the cultural hubs he has long studied. However, after meeting with the senior solicitor of the firm, he's presented with a mystery and a challenge. Can he prove his direct descent from the originator of the trust, Ashley Walshingham, a British officer during WWI and mountaineer who lost his life on the slopes of Everest in 1924 in a failed attempt to reach the summit? The terms of the trust specify that Tristan nor the solicitors can hire anyone to do the work nor tell anyone why they are investigating someone long gone. And oh, yes you only have two months to unearth conclusive evidence before the trust is dissolved and dispersed to local churches and charities.
Before he leaves, Tristan is shown one surviving document that the solicitors have in their possession that would suggest his great grandmother was not his great grandmother but his great great aunt instead.
A young American, Tristan, recently graduated from the University of California with a history degree, receives a phone call out of the blue from a London attorney. He may be the heir to a vast fortune left by a 1920s British mountaineer to his lost lover and her direct descendants. He has seven weeks to prove that he is a genuine descendant of this mysterious woman, who appears to have been the sister of his great-grandmother. After that, the fortune is distributed to charities and foundations.
Tristan takes off for London to begin his researches which then take him to Sweden, Paris, Picardy (where the most brutal battles of the First World War were fought), Berlin and Iceland piecing together the clues of what happened to the climber, Ashley Walsingham, and his lover, the maddening and enigmatic Imogen Soames-Andersson.
The narrative swings back and forth between the past and the present. Walsingham meets Imogen a week before he is deployed as an office to the Western Front where the Battle of the Somme is in full swing. The two fall impetuously in love, spend five glorious days together and he then departs. Imogen soon discovers she is "with child."
The descriptions of life on the front line in the trenches are the strongest part of this book and they are really very fine. The author has a real talent for evoking time and place - and action. I have to say he is not quite as good at creating realistic, fully-formed characters and one feels a slight distance from both Ashley and Imogen. They say and do things together but the sparks of a great love don't really ignite through these pages. And Imogen's reason for ultimately rejecting Ashley seems both childish and, in the context of the time, utterly unrealistic.
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