Common

Nikolai Duffy author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Goldsmith's Press

Published:21st Oct '25

Should be back in stock very soon

Common cover

A coming to terms with marriage and career, the life-long impact of a father’s alcoholism, and an aunt’s insistent example to live an unroofed life. “I had gone to the common under the vague impression that I wished to recapture something of a life I no longer possessed.” Following his aunt Abilene’s death, Robert travels from Manchester to Hampshire to settle her estate. Instead of fulfilling his executor duties, he impulsively builds a hut on nearby Ludshott Common and stays for seven days. This introspective novel explores his week in nature as he grapples with loss, disillusionment, marriage, career, parenthood, white male privilege, and his father’s alcoholism. Blending fiction, auto-fiction, and place writing, Common is a novel about solitude, connection, and the fragile peace we attempt to make with ourselves—a portrait of renewal, reckoning, and the frequently failed attempt to reconnect with both past legacies and present realities.

“A beautiful novel, radically humane, intelligent and curious. In doing away with the trappings of conventional narrative along with their capacity for reduction, Duffy creates something far more urgent – and a story far more engaging. Every sentence feels perfectly weighted and imbued with a rare honesty that makes it one of the more profound meditations on life, love and mortality I’ve read.” - Luke Kennard “Through this lyrical and beautifully poised novel, we come to understand how quietly a man’s life can fall apart and how violence and love can send their after image into our hearts and minds for years. Duffy asks us to reflect on the compromises we make to survive and to move through the world, holding each one up to the light in this deeply moving meditation on family, marriage and grief.” - Kim Moore “Common suggests nothing out of the ordinary and yet here, around the building of a hut, we have the remarkable accrual of an ordinary life. Through the thickets of various relationships, we are invited to tread a fine and deftly-drawn line between shelter and isolation.” - Rachel Genn

ISBN: 9781915983428

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

192 pages