'A wild, darkly comic nightmare set on the borderlines of creativity, imagination and madness.' Guardian
'Thompson's prose, contaminated by Bacon's unflinching view of the human animal, makes for vital, unsettling reading' - Will Maclean, author of The Apparition Phase
In this shocking, and at times darkly comic, novel, a psychiatrist hired to write a short piece on Francis Bacon becomes obsessed with the artist, his life, and the characters who surrounded him.
As he becomes consumed with the need to understand Bacon, and to create his own art, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, and he is haunted by disturbing figures.
This short, bold piece of fiction, explores how the passion needed to create art can also destroy the artist.
Genre: Literary Fiction
'Thompson's prose, contaminated by Bacon's unflinching view of the human animal, makes for vital, unsettling reading' - Will Maclean, author of The Apparition Phase
In this shocking, and at times darkly comic, novel, a psychiatrist hired to write a short piece on Francis Bacon becomes obsessed with the artist, his life, and the characters who surrounded him.
As he becomes consumed with the need to understand Bacon, and to create his own art, his grip on reality becomes increasingly tenuous, and he is haunted by disturbing figures.
This short, bold piece of fiction, explores how the passion needed to create art can also destroy the artist.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"A darkly brilliant meditation on art, obsession and identity." - Mike Carey
"A wild and febrile romp through the author's brilliant imagination, this is a fever dream of a book which depicts an unsettling, absurd and sometimes comedic transgression of social norms and an ascent to the glorious echelons of madness." - Lucie McKnight Hardy
"Thompson's prose, contaminated by Bacon's unflinching view of the human animal, makes for vital, unsettling reading." - Will Maclean
"Like Joyce's Nighttown sequence, Jackdaw dwells timelessly along some ever-undefined border between dreams, the actual, the creatively imagined, and hard-edged hallucination. It is brutal, unremitting and, very much in its own steadfast manner, brilliant." - James Sallis
"Jackdaw blurs the lines of fiction and memoir and reality itself, and the result is as disturbing as it is thrilling. Tade Thompson, this mad genius, somehow created a literary equivalent of a Francis Bacon painting. I'm in awe." - Paul Tremblay
"A wild and febrile romp through the author's brilliant imagination, this is a fever dream of a book which depicts an unsettling, absurd and sometimes comedic transgression of social norms and an ascent to the glorious echelons of madness." - Lucie McKnight Hardy
"Thompson's prose, contaminated by Bacon's unflinching view of the human animal, makes for vital, unsettling reading." - Will Maclean
"Like Joyce's Nighttown sequence, Jackdaw dwells timelessly along some ever-undefined border between dreams, the actual, the creatively imagined, and hard-edged hallucination. It is brutal, unremitting and, very much in its own steadfast manner, brilliant." - James Sallis
"Jackdaw blurs the lines of fiction and memoir and reality itself, and the result is as disturbing as it is thrilling. Tade Thompson, this mad genius, somehow created a literary equivalent of a Francis Bacon painting. I'm in awe." - Paul Tremblay
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