K. M. Ross: The Blinding Walk

K. M. Ross: The Blinding Walk (2014)

Pretty exciting news in the post this morning: I opened up the mailbox to find a copy of my brother Ken's huge new novel, just published by Waywiser Press in Oxford (UK). It's a pretty damned handsome looking book, I reckon, and I was very pleased to see that it can readily be ordered from this country, too (I checked on Fishpond - no extra postage costs - but no doubt it's available through most of the other sites as well).



cover with spine

There's some interesting comments in the interview with Rebecca Robinson which you can find on the Waywiser site. She asks him, "Who are your major influences?" (a little like that scene in The Commitments where each musician auditioning for Jimmy Rabbitte's soul band has to state their affiliations before they've even allowed in the door):

In English language literature, the great Modernists, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway and Virginia Woolf; J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis; Joseph Conrad and Henry James; extraordinary individual talents such as Laurence Sterne, John Cowper Powys and Patrick White; Post-Modernists such as Kathy Acker and J. G. Ballard; and too many poets to name. In other languages: Old Icelandic Saga literature, Snorri Sturluson; the Russians; Proust and Georges Perec; and the modern South Americans: García Márquez and Vargas Llosa and Jorge Luis Borges and so many others. I also tend to draw ideas from film (Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman), graphic novels, and music of all eras.

You can find out more about the novel itself from the blurb and summary up on the site, but I thought I'd just mention here that Ken's previous novel, Falling Through the Architect, was published by the Writers Group here in New Zealand in 2005:


cover image by Will Maclean / Cover design by James Fryer

Those of you who are aficionados of brief magazine might also be interested to hear that Ken has published quite a lot of material in that journal over the years, including substantial extracts from both novels. Here's a list from the brief authors' page: The Demon Home / 24 (2002): 17-18from Falling Through the Architect / 25 (2002): 45-48Rambo; Dumped / 27 (2003): 77-82Sun’s Lid / 29 (2004): 53-56Tripping / 30 (2004): 92-95Out and Out / 31 (2004): 80-82Exile and the Wolf / 33 (2006): 41-43The Art of. .. / 34 (2007): 116-19Te Ika / 35 (2007): 83-87Review of Song of the Brakeman by Bill Direen / 35 (2007): 120-21The Clay Monster / 36 (2008): 83-86Venusian Transit / 37 (2009): 32-38Thrash / 39 (2010): 3-9The Headless: Lucy /40 (2010): 66-69The Headless: Coleop / 41 (2010): 10-13Ballad of the Kitchen Corner / 42 (2011): 58-62The Last Great Road Race / 46 (2012): 133-39from The Blinding Walk / 50 (2014): 75-93

Ken's doing a reading from The Blinding Walk at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore (great name for a bookshop!), 34 Walton Street, Oxford, on Friday 24th October at 7:30 p.m., so if any of you happen to be in the UK, you might like to check that out as well.

The book is dedicated to my sister Anne, and among the acknowledgements Bronwyn and I are both listed. This is a very special event for us, and I wish Ken great joy from this wonderful success. Now let's just sell a few copies! It is about a couple of feckless Kiwis on their OE, so you'd think that would ring a chord with a lot of readers, both local and expatriate.



K M Ross