OK, Mr Field

A pianist has an accident and is forced to abandon his career. He and his wife move to South Africa to live in a house he has developed an obsession with-a house built by a South African architect inspired by Le Corbusier. Within weeks of arriving, Mr Field's wife inexplicably leaves him, to which he has responds with curious lassitude. But in this house on the South African coast (Corbusier's 'machine for living'), some shifts are triggered in its sole occupant. The sequences of spaces in which he lives, which seem to lead towards and away from their destinations at once, mirror his feeling that the things he yearns for are always getting further and further out of reach. But the house's most potent effect on Mr Field is its conjuring up of Hannah Kallenbach, its prior inhabitant, whom he begins to stalk. With a rare, scintillating and poetic eye, Katharine Kilalea conveys some of the deepest human emotion in the most curious of details. OK Mr Field is one of the most unusual and vital works of literature to be published on the Faber list in years.