“He no longer wanted to write the book described in the outline they had paid for. Or maybe he didn’t have the ability.” At first glance it appears that we could be in difficult second album territory with Chris Power’s debut novel. A Lonely Man follows Mothers, an acclaimed collection of short stories that was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2018.
Alarm bells ring in early chapters when the book’s protagonist, Robert, a novelist living in Berlin with his young family, spends his time mooching about the city, struggling to write a novel after a successful collection of short stories some years previously. Is this, we wonder, to be a novel about the difficult process of writing a novel?