The Cemetery at Barnes

"Gabriel Josipovici is one of our most brilliant writers – every new book is an event to look forward to," writes Deborah Levy. The Cemetery at Barnes, is no exception: a short, intense mystery novel that opens in gentle elegy and advances towards diabolism and murder. Its three plots, relationships and time-scales are tightly woven into a single story, the three main voices – as in an opera by Monteverdi – providing the soundtrack enhanced by the chorus of friends and acquaintances. The book advances in the present continuous, a dramatic risk that keeps us close to the action. The main voice is that of a translator who moves from London to Paris to Wales, the setting for an unexpected conflagration. The ending at once confirms and suspends the reader’s darkest intuitions. Characters live as many lives as they have readers. And, wittily, this novel visits and re-reads Josipovici’s earlier fiction as it goes. His is a plain-seeming art of rich accruals.