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The Accident on the A35

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applause. serious applause. If my reading year continues to maintain this quality, I'll be a very happy reader person. Unflashy yet highly accomplished, The Accident on the A35 works on several levels. It’s the story of a bereaved schoolboy going off the rails and a middle-aged man whose wife has had enough – and his subsequent poignant need to return to his boyhood home to live with his widowed mother, who has dementia. It has a denouement like something out of Greek tragedy but delivers as a proper police procedural too, with further mystery when Gorski is drawn reluctantly into the unsolved case of a Strasbourg woman strangled, it turns out, in the unaccounted hours before Bertrand’s death. The reader comes away with the impression that the author is deeply knowledgeable about the topics encountered in the situations, and not that he has just shallowly researched them for the purposes of the book. This is no more apparent than when Gorski is interviewing people. Also GMB has a very good grasp on social dynamics. The way the characters interact with, and react to each other is absolutely pitch perfect. Example: The metafiction element of this book turns it into a work of art, and opens up a discussion about fiction and literature in general, and the way it may or may not be intertwined with the lives of the writers who wrote it. After reading this you may question other books, and which parts of them are real or fiction. It’s very poetic. Macrae Burnet becomes a character himself, that comments on and critiques the work, which to some extent, absolves him of the responsibility for any of it’s flaws. He says exactly what you are thinking at the end of the book. If it was overused it would be a cop-out, but it isn’t (to me at least, in fact I think it’s the first time I’ve seen this), so it feels very original. We’ll leave it at that before we spoil it for anyone. But it is a very interesting device which is beginning to characterise and define Macrae Burnet’s work.

All the other characters we meet along the way are just as well-drawn, building up a complete picture of the two neighbouring societies at the heart of the story. Despite the relative brevity of the book, the secondary characters are allowed to develop over time, making them feel rounded and true. Short sketches of people who appear only for moments in a café or on the street all add to the understanding of the culture, which in turn adds to our understanding of how it has formed and shaped our main characters, Raymond and Gorski. Not a word is wasted – with the briefest of descriptions, Burnet can create a person who feels real, solid, entire, as if they might be a neighbour we've known all our life. In a statement released today (January 17), police said a family from Cornwall were travelling in the BMW involved at the time of the crash. I approached The Accident on the A35 with no expectations either way, aware that the original manuscript by French author Raymond Brunet had been delivered to his editor in Paris by his solicitors in Mulhouse following the death of the author’s mother. (Brunet had committed suicide 22 years earlier by throwing himself in front of the train at Saint-Louis). Brunet had published The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, made into a film by celebrated French director Claude Chabrol, and there was excitement in the literary world that the “new” manuscript had been authenticated and was to be published. The third person narrative of the books drifts between different perspectives. This is very pleasing. It allows you an insight into the characters thoughts without too much exposition. The way the narration is handled in scenes where both of the main characters feature is masterful. The introduction of these characters is seamless. This novel is situated in Saint-Louis in France. It is is structured in two parts. The first part is the plot about how the death of Bertrand Barthelme during a car crash affects the lives of the two main protagonists. The first protagonist is Georges Gorski, a senior officer in the St Louis police force who is investigating the crash. The second is Raymond Barthelme, the son of Bertrand Barthelme.

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In conclusion I was impressed by Graeme Macrea Burnet's skills as a writer and reading this novel has reinforced the high opinion I formed of him when reading His Bloody Project; he has intrigued and inspired me to read The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau. The two adults - both in their 30s - were also taken to hospital but their injuries are not believed to be serious. Gorski, led on by the dead man's wife, who does not believe that her husband's death was an accident, travels to a neighboring town to try and find answers about the actual cause of Barthelme's death. It appears that Barthelme had lied about his whereabouts on the night of his death. I was introduced to Scottish author, Graeme Macrae Burnet, with His Blood Project, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2016. A brilliant novel and one worth every 5 stars I gave it. Given the opportunity to read his Accident on the A35, I jumped at it. A spokeswoman from Dorset & Wiltshire Fire Rescue Service said: "At 2.56pm yesterday, we were notified by the police about a road traffic collision on Puddletown Bypass.

His Bloody Project was presented as a collection of documents unearthed by Burnet as he traced his family tree. This time he’s the translator of a French writer named Raymond Brunet, who after publishing The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau killed himself in 1992. Two decades later, on the death of his mother, lawyers acting for Raymond (mark the name) sent his publisher a parcel containing the manuscript of L’Accident sur l’A35. Now the whole novel is seen as a real life description linked in to the memory of Raymond Brunet who is narrating his own experiences through the character of Raymond Barthelme. As the reader we are considering the macrocosm of Graeme Macrae Burnet, the overall author, manipulating the characters of Raymond Brunet, the sub author, and the smaller characters of George Gorski and Raymond Brunet. I find this an extremely intelligent device to add depth and emotion to the novel. Notice the spelling of the real author Burnet and the spelling of the fictitious author Brunet. When I first glanced at my copy of the book I thought that there had been a typographical error at the editing stage, until it was pointed out by my husband that there was a spelling differentiation and that the similarity was intentional. Here the reality and the fiction is blurred. Let’s get a look,” she said, holding her hand out. I passed her the book. “Mmmm,” she murmured sarcastically, eyeing the cover. “Sounds… interesting.”

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A spokeswoman for the South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) said: “We were called at 2.17pm to an incident near Puddletown and sent three double-crewed land ambulances, a critical care car, an operations officer, a rapid response vehicle and an air ambulance." A five-year-old girl inside the BMW died while an eight-year-old girl who was in the same car remains in hospital with serious injuries.

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