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A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall

A Novel

ebook
2 of 3 copies available
2 of 3 copies available

A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall is an exuberant literary debut—a novel of real ideas and a playful examination of our in-between world, one that explores the nature of family, identity, art, and belief while also marking the introduction of an original new voice in contemporary fiction.

Owen Burr is the six-foot-eight, Olympics-bound senior captain of the Stanford University water polo team. In his final collegiate match, however, he suffers a catastrophic injury that destroys his hopes and dreams, flattening his entire world into two dimensions. His identity as an athlete erased but his ambition indelible, he defies his father, a classics professor who lives in a "cave" of his own making, and moves to Berlin with naive plans to make conceptual art. Then he disappears.

Without a single clue as to his son's location, Dr. Burr embarks upon a tour of public lectures from Greece to Germany to Iceland in an attempt to draw out his endangered son. Instead, he foments a violent uprising.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 21, 2014
      While preparing to compete in the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Stanford water polo star Owen Burr is struck in the face by another player, losing an eye, along with any hope of a medal. So Owen, the son of a respected classics professor, slips away to Berlin to try his hand at making art. There, he falls in with the world-famous—and slippery—artist Kurt Wagener and disappears. While Owen’s father launches a new career as a social theorist to facilitate a trip through Europe during which he can search for his missing son, Kurt offers to promote Owen as an “outsider artist” at Art Basel, one of the world’s premier art expos. In the lead-up to the show, Kurt keeps Owen in seclusion at his Berlin studio. Owen discovers too late that his new collaborator cannot be trusted, after Kurt tricks him into giving up his intellectual property rights and feeds him dangerous drugs. Meanwhile, his father—branded a terrorist after making an explosive speech in Athens—hunts for clues to his boy’s whereabouts. Chancellor’s debut is a twisting, globe-trotting affair that unfortunately suffers from poor pacing and frequently dwells on the mundane. The result is a mixed bag, unsure of its own identity, like many of the book’s characters.

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Languages

  • English

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