Hypnotic and profoundly honest, Hourglass serves up a revolutionary love story and an anatomy of heartbreak in ecstatic, exquisitely crafted prose.
Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2022
The second time you came, we went from bar to bar to bar. It made the city feel smaller. Like a map we were folding to the size of a stamp. We were good at that. We could have fit an entire universe inside a matchbox.
Love builds up little by little and that's why it makes people reach for words like root and sediment and other words to do with rocks and trees. But what about the dismantling? Does it happen that way too? Because it feels like it is happening much, much faster. And I am reaching for words like landslide and like wave and like storm...
Exquisitely crafted, wildly imaginative and as darkly funny as it is moving, Hourglass is a revolutionary love story. It turns time upside down, combs the intimate wreckage of heartbreak for something universal, and asks what it means to lose what you love.
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 9781408714874
Number of pages: 208
Weight: 289 g
Dimensions: 202 x 132 x 26 mm
Beautiful, funny, profound ... Read it in one glowing session - New Statesman
The charms of Hourglass, like those of the narrator himself, are insidious. This is a sad book that is somehow wickedly fun to read - LA Times
An arresting, exquisitely told love story ... if ever a book could be read as a pilgrimage to discover what the heart finds sacred, this is it. - Irish Times
Hourglass burnishes its ideas of love and agony with an almost mystical attention to feeling. This book truly glows in the heart of the reader - Max Porter
Evocative, ecstatic, and saturated with off-kilter wit, Hourglass renders heartbreak as both vividly, luminously particular, and intensely, intimately familiar. There are lines from this remarkable book etched all over my memory, indelible - Alexandra Kleeman
This book is such a sneaky head f*ck - an epic poem in an ancient style about the brutalities of modern love, a masculine interrogation of feminine heartbreak, a really beautiful way to spend an evening - Lena Dunham
Hourglass will stay with me for a long time. Hypnotic. - Lemn Sissay
A book for anyone who ever has been or ever will be heartbroken. So that's everyone. - Hollie McNish
A stunning reimagining of the love story ... every word shines new and true - Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
Shockingly intimate and devastatingly funny, bleak and true - Luke Kennard, author of The Answer to Everything
This book is a world. A broken dance floor of glass and gold, so rare and precious you barely believe it is real, but haunts you all day like a song. Vivid and brilliant. - Greta Bellamacina
This is high-wire writing: a novel where every sentence counts. They add up to something profoundly honest and truly magical - Matt Thorne
This is a beautiful book: by turns tough and tender, acerbically funny and deeply humane. Keiran Goddard's mind is a marvel. We are lucky to have him. - Tabitha Lasley
A story of doomed romance as touching as it is abstract - Financial Times
A universal love story - Guardian
Beautiful and very funny - Brett Anderson
What an interesting format for a book and not like anything I have read before. The author meanders through his stream of consciousness about the meaning of life and love adopting a style that I can only describe as... More
Powerful novel written in extraordinary prose/poetry that details the beginning and end of a relationship. Brutally honest in parts, the narrator takes you down to his lowest points, crawling on the floor or shouting... More
Hourglass is an interesting debut novel by Kieran Goddard. The format is different to the traditional novel but it works. We follow his journey to finding the meaning of love, life and loss. Some aspects were truly... More
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