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The
2003 Award
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Marcel by
Erwin Mortier Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: Harvill Press ISBN 1860468748 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| The
narrator is a ten-year-old boy who lives alone with his grandparents in
a Flemish village. His grandmother guards the family dead with fierce determination,
obsessively tending their graves, arranging and rearranging their photographs
in a special cabinet, talking to them and arguing with them. The cabinet
is an extension of heaven, with its own purgatory and hell: their place
in his grandmother's favour is marked by their proximity to a statue of
the Blessed Virgin. But one image is always next to the Virgin: Marcel, who died young, far away, and for whom there is no grave. How did he die? His laughing eyes, staring out from a face already half obliterated by the sun, give nothing away. Only when the boy comes upon letters that hint at a hidden past, does he decide to learn who Marcel was, and why the circumstances of his death remain so painful. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Erwin Mortier was born in Flanders in 1956. Marcel, his debut novel, has won numerous literary prizes in the Netherlands and Flanders and acclaim throughout Europe. He works in Ghent at the Museum of the History of Psychiatry and as a journalist. |
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