LOVE NOTES FROM A GERMAN BUILDING SITE
Original Irish edition, The Lilliput Press, April, 2019

Winner of the John McGahern Book Prize, 2019.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Dalkey Literary Awards for Emerging Writers.
Readers of Europe Project, Irish Selection, 2022






Love Notes from a German Building Site, Adrian Duncan’s first novel, is written with such thrilling precision, such attention to detail, such care in the evocation of sensibility that you are fully transported into the world of a Berlin building site.

– Colm Tóibín, The Guardian





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Novel with The Lilliput Press (click image for more information)






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A rare book – a debut novel that has the capacity to become a major work of art.
It is the best book I have read in years – it contains that magical balance of mastery
and uncertainty and recklessness that creates something new in literature,
something that can last, and something that needs to get out to the world.

Greg Baxter, author of Munich Airport



With elegance and precision, this beautiful book shows the forces which act on the structures of buildings and those which impact on relationships. Duncan’s Berlin building site is, perhaps surprisingly, a brilliantly compelling place, the complications of construction converging with the complex experiences of those who work there.

Wendy Erskine, author of Sweet Home



Love Notes from a German Building Site is a strange, oblique, haunted work of quiet meditative intelligence. Adrian Duncan evokes the building of cities and the dislocated, phantasmic lives that unfold amid their looming geometries. His debut novel contains some of the finest writing on love I’ve read in recent memory.

Rob Doyle, author of Here are the Young Men



PRESS



... Duncan gives us the human soul of a building site with all the flaws and vulnerabilities laid bare. In such a brutish and masculine atmosphere, Duncan's account is an unmasked ray of hope ... The prose is minimal yet the ideas are maximal. If more men thought and wrote as tenderly and honestly as Adrian Duncan we'd have stronger sturdier novels and fewer garish monuments to consumerism.

– David O'Connor, The Sunday Independent



... Not a huge number of literary novels tackle the world of work. Philip Roth did it very successfully with compelling accounts in his American trilogy of the skills of the glovemaker and the mineralogist ... Duncan’s world is a more down-to-earth or down to muck, blood and sweat one, in spite of the aesthetic temperament of his protagonist ... Out of this rather unusual material Adrian Duncan has crafted a quiet, beautifully written, intellectually provocative and compelling story, an assured blend of mastery and mystery.

– Enda O'Doherty, The Dublin Review of Books



... a reflective, beautifully paced novel...

– Sarah Gilmartin, The Irish Times



Love Notes is a quietly powerful book that will connect with myriad types of reader. It's a blending of styles, is exciting and forward-thinking, with a story full of heart.

– Eoghan O'Sullivan, The Irish Examiner



... an excellent and a daring debut.

– Shrinidhi Kalwad, The Dublin inquirer



The novel is in three parts ... charting the building’s progress through to its looming completion date, as well as the changing states of Paul and Evelyn’s relationship. Duncan empathetically navigates both terrains with beautiful, cinematic surges of light and stark linear description.

– Catherine Gaffney, Totally Dublin






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LOVE NOTES FROM A GERMAN BUILDING SITE – UK EDITION
with Head of Zeus, October 2019





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Novel with Head of Zeus (click image for more information)







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PRESS



... a beguiling first novel ... subtle and poetic ...

– Harry Strawson, The Times Literary Supplement



... the novel’s richness comes from the way it evokes the experience of being a migrant worker, and from Paul’s musings about the world as his sense of dislocation deepens – particularly his fascination with the German language and the gap between abstract thoughts and concrete reality.

– Alastair Mabbott, Herald Scotland



Duncan ... could not express himself more eloquently or masterfully in this stunning debut novel.

– Elizabeth Fitzherbert, The Lady Magazine


... a deeply interesting novel, which reveals as much about the social
and professional microcosm of the building site, as it does about the architecture, social and literal, of the modern city.

– Claire Thomson, Severine






FURTHER INFORMATION


This is the first iteration of my ongoing building-site project.
It is a novel published by the Lilliput Press and Head of Zeus (UK) in 2019. Link here.

The second iteration takes the form of sculpture and photography. Some of this work was shown at NCAD Gallery in 2018 in a show curated by Anne Kelly titled Infrastructures of Now. Link here.

Thank you to the estate of Gordon Matta-Clark for allowing me to use Conical Intersect (1975) on the cover of the Irish version of the book.

While writing this novel I received artist-bursary funding from the Arts Council.



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