Description
Walking turn-of-the-century Amsterdam with her loyal dog Bibi, Femke is many things: a drifter who spends much of her time in a drug-ridden park; a daughter of the colonial Dutch; a magnetic personality prone to petit mal seizures and destructive relationships; a liar. This is her story. After being drawn into the unsettling world of a British filmmaker and his wife, she meets and befriends an ageing poet, Michiel de Koning, and tries to nurse him back to health. As their friendship develops, De Koning's mysterious past - involving the poet and murderer Gerrit Achterberg - leads Femke on a journey to discover the identity of De Koning's great love and inspiration, 'M'. This pursuit of the truth reveals the uncertainties of her own past in a world of unreliable listeners. Written with a clear poetic sensibility and strong echoes of European Modernism, Femke is a celebration of the stories we tell ourselves and one another, the elusiveness of our fleeting connections, and the complex power dynamics between poet and muse.
About the Author
David Cameron is a Glasgow-born poet and novelist. In 2014 he received the Hennessy Literary Award. He is, according to Ron Butlin, 'one of the most insightful and thought-provoking poets around', and his poetry (collected in The Bright Tethers and Korean Letters) has also been praised by Seamus Heaney and Liz Lochhead, among others. Reviewing Cameron's first collection of fiction, Rousseau Moon, Robert Nye wrote that his work 'transmutes the base matter of common experience into something like gold'; Alistair Braidwood described Cameron's experimental novel, Prendergast's Fall, as 'one of the most inventive and interesting novels of recent times'. Cameron has also written a critical study, Samuel Beckett: The Middle and Later Years. He continues to work closely with the Toronto-based composer David Jaeger on several settings of his poems. From late 2000 to mid-2004, Cameron lived in Amsterdam, where Femke is set, teaching English before becoming a writer-editor for the European Cultural Foundation. He now works as a learning consultant in Belfast. He is married to the Irish glass artist Louise Rice, and they have three children.
Reviews
'Compelling. Femke is a truly unique and memorable character.' - Ewan Morrison
Book Information
ISBN 9781838080082
Author David Cameron
Format Hardback
Imprint Taproot Press
Publisher Taproot Press
About the Author
David Cameron is a Glasgow-born poet and novelist. In 2014 he received the Hennessy Literary Award. He is, according to Ron Butlin, 'one of the most insightful and thought-provoking poets around', and his poetry (collected in The Bright Tethers and Korean Letters) has also been praised by Seamus Heaney and Liz Lochhead, among others. Reviewing Cameron's first collection of fiction, Rousseau Moon, Robert Nye wrote that his work 'transmutes the base matter of common experience into something like gold'; Alistair Braidwood described Cameron's experimental novel, Prendergast's Fall, as 'one of the most inventive and interesting novels of recent times'. Cameron has also written a critical study, Samuel Beckett: The Middle and Later Years. He continues to work closely with the Toronto-based composer David Jaeger on several settings of his poems. From late 2000 to mid-2004, Cameron lived in Amsterdam, where Femke is set, teaching English before becoming a writer-editor for the European Cultural Foundation. He now works as a learning consultant in Belfast. He is married to the Irish glass artist Louise Rice, and they have three children.
Reviews
'Compelling. Femke is a truly unique and memorable character.' - Ewan Morrison
Book Information
ISBN 9781838080082
Author David Cameron
Format Hardback
Imprint Taproot Press
Publisher Taproot Press
