Broken
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 0099565536 / Publisher: Vintage Books, August 2012
She creates him for Alvar Eide, a quiet, middle-aged man whose life is carefully designed to avoid surprise, but when a young heroine addict comes into the gallery where he works, Alvar's life is changed forever and his inventor realises that she cannot control the character she has created.
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A gripping novel set on the boundary between fact and fiction.A woman wakes one night to find that a strange man has walked into her bedroom. She lies there in terrified silence unable to move. The woman is an author and the man one of her prospective characters. So desperate is he to have his story told that he has resorted to breaking into her house to make her tell it.She creates Alvar Eide, forty-two years old, single, who works in an art gallery. He lives a quiet, dutiful life, carefully designed to avoid surprises. One winter’s day, all this begins to change when an emaciated young heroin addict walks into the gallery. A kind man, Alvar gives her a cup of coffee to warm her up. She returns some weeks later to his place of work, and then one day appears on his doorstep demanding to be let in.Interspersed with the chapters of Alvar’s story are his encounters with its author — the frantic attempts of a fictional man trying to control his own destiny. Broken is a gripping novel about the boundary between fact and fiction and the perils of good intentions.
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