Coming to America

In the Company of Angels, a luminous love story and an internationally acclaimed masterpiece, is at last being published in the United States for the first time. You can meet its author Thomas E Kennedy at Magers & Quinn--7:30pm, Friday, November 19.

“[A] wide-ranging and assured novel….The stories of torture that emerge…offer, in their horror and dignity, a quiet criticism of the characters with more prosaic problems.”--New Yorker

Imprisoned for teaching political poetry to his students, Bernardo Greene has been tortured for months in Pinochet’s Chile when he is visited by two angels who promise that he will survive to experience beauty and love once again. Months later, in Copenhagen, where he has come for treatment, the Chilean exile befriends Michela Ibsen, herself a survivor of domestic abuse. In the long nights of summer, the two of them struggle to heal, to forgive those who have left them damaged, and to trust themselves to love. Taking on the very best and the very worst of human experience, In the Company of Angels is a moving, achingly human story that achieves a fable-like quality rare in contemporary fiction. Dense with wisdom and humanity, this already acclaimed novel is a riveting testament to the resilience and complexity of the human heart.

“In the Company of Angels... is powerful and of the moment.... Kennedy writes clean, evocative prose, and an occasional note of humor leavens this dark novel. He is a writer to be reckoned with, and it's about time the reckoning got underway in the country of his birth.”--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

Thomas E. Kennedy spent his youth hitchhiking and writing his way around the United States before moving to Europe, where he has quietly published over twenty books. In the decade from 1995 to 2005, he wrote the Copenhagen Quartet, four novels set in the Danish capital, his adopted home. Published in Ireland and Denmark, the Copenhagen Quartet won international awards and was hailed as a “masterpiece” by Duff Brenna. Critics concurred, establishing Kennedy as a daring writer of rare grace and vision. Yet his work has never seen major publication in his native country. In the Company of Angels is the first novel of the Quartet to appear here.Details are here.--David E