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An Honest Man", written by Simon Michael and published in paperback by Urbane Publications on 7 July 2016. I was constantly second guessing what people wanted from me, always aware that there were many thoughts and feelings I was necessarily burying. When the biggest brief of Charles's career unexpectedly lands on his desk, it looks as if he has been thrown a lifeline. I love novels where characters can evolve, can tell a story that draws me deep into it, and that makes me long for those fictional people and their stories the moment I read the last lines of the book. For this and for a lot more, the novel is also a delicate coming-out story, as there is a maturing process concerning Ralf's coming to terms with his feelings and himself in a time where coming out was no easy deal with the AIDS crisis just around the corner and homosexuality being so much despised.
As Ralf struggles to reconcile himself with his growing attraction, and feelings, towards Oz, he also learns that Oz is keeping tabs on one of his neighbours, Tobias Rose. We will soon learn that she was aboard the deadly yacht Israel came across and swam to shore and safety.
It is the story of the last school year of Ralf Dorsam who lives in the same old apartment building in West Berlin used as a setting for Fergusson’s two prior novels. Koryta’s atmospheric prose is a treat, too, tempering Maine’s natural beauty with hints of the island’s corruption: “The sea was calm but the air was uneasy, too warm, too still.
And the novel has a tragic depth that leaves the reader disturbed and in shock as psychological walls dissolve and the truth slowly unwinds. In 2008 he was honored as a "distinguished young alumni" by Indiana University, and in 2010 he was named "distinguished alumni' by the criminal justice department.The author made Israel Pike and the child he befriended very sympathetic as they were fighting the establishment government of the hometown island. Throughout the narrative, Fergusson vividly injects observations that are so mundane and commonplace to human existence, regardless of time or place, you marvel at how he ever thought of them.
His close-knit group of friends include Maike, Ralf’s erstwhile girlfriend; Stefan, his closest friend; and Petra, who has an on-off relationship with Stefan. Refusing to give her real name, Lyman playfully names her ‘Hatchet,’ and she will come to be a key puzzle piece in this tightly wound plot. Ben Fergusson rightly does so in both his first novel “The Spring of Kasper Meier” which describes the city soon after it was jointly occupied by the Allied powers and in his new novel “An Honest Man” which takes place in the time immediately preceding The Berlin Wall’s collapse in 1989.He is having bisexual yearnings but has had most experience with his friend Maike Eillert who is part of a group of teenagers with whom he socialises. The relationship between Raif and Oz is depicted with conviction, but the characterisation elsewhere is done with broad brush strokes-- teenagers are too often symbolised by expletives. His narrative is sensual, as he always seem to loose himself in the bodies of those around him, describing bodies, someone's details almost with the painter's accuracy. You could see through all the trauma, even Israel and Lyman appreciated the beauty of the islands nature.
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