Port Mungo - Rilegato

"The kind of book that plants a seed in your mind that will germinate days or weeks later . . . A mesmerizing tropical tale with unforgettable characters, and an intriguing new direction for this supremely talented novelist." --Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com

"Engrossing . . . Nuanced . . . Port Mungo offers a portrait of the artist hero that shifts like a hologram [and displays] a restless, mischief-seeking intelligence." --Kai Maristed, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Port Mungo is luridly fascinating and claustrophobic, a Grand Guignol pageant of cosmic passion, obsessive reflectivity and reprisal. McGrath's control over vocabulary and tone falter not a whit, and his exploration of the twinned impulses of creativity and despair, genius and moral bankruptcy is riveting." --Fredric Koeppel, Memphis Commercial Appeal

"Suffused as it is by the glare of the tropics, [Port Mungo's] narrative voice is the equivalent of darkness. Figures emerge from it and then subside back into it. In between they act, and such is the character of that darkness that one knows how only later, by virtue of the wounds they leave behind."--Peter Trachtenberg, Bookforum

"Astoundingly good . . . The outstanding feature of McGrath's storytelling is his ability to write with tranquil, evocative beauty about the vilest of subjects. Port Mungo is haunting not because of any trickery of reversed expectation or suspended belief, but because we see so completely how damaging the most basic human emotions can be." --Elaina Richardson, O Magazine

"A compelling read." --Seattle Times

“Sophisticatedly jaded . . . immensely clever and tautly composed . . . [A] sinister, shifting web of family unrest and intrigue [and a] meditation on the shadowy wellsprings of art and love. [Port Mungo is] more artfully contrived than Patrick McGrath's previous work, and more intricately bound up with the larger issues [of] artistic truth and psychological truth." –Christopher Benfey, New York Times Book Review

“[Patrick McGrath’s] superb and unwholesome new novel [is] about the brutal impulses available to anyone, especially artists, who would let slip the loose restraints of civilization . . . There is no end of mysteries . . . In his shimmering way, McGrath pulls back the curtain on a terrible one and says, ‘Look!’ When he brings you to that place so adroitly, who can say no?” –Richard Lacayo, Time

"Port Mungo, [Patrick McGrath's] sixth novel, might best be described as the story of a love triangle: between Jack Rathbone, a self-absorbed English painter; his lover, the flamboyantly reckless Vera Savage; and his adoring sister, Gin Rathbone, who narrates Jack's odyssey through obsession, loss, and grief . . . There are hints of Joseph Conrad in Gin's account of her brother's slow, sun-drenched descent into a state of primal impulses, [sustained by] the sheer force of McGrath's elliptical prose, through his superbly atmospheric evocations of place and mood, and through his proven ability to surprise and horrify readers."--Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times

"Port Mungo is about the spiritual struggle to bring art into being, and how that struggle becomes harder over time . . . [McGrath] evokes the wild abandon of [his hero's] art in carefully measured sentences of clipped precision and articulate control." --Alfred Hickling, The Guardian

"Skillful and entertaining . . . An appalled account of an artist's life, tallying the damage he perpetrates to those around him in the task to make." --David Flusfeder, The Daily Telegraph

"Exciting . . . [McGrath] is a highly esteemed writer [who] succeeds in creating a convincingly twisted family here."--Kristine Huntley, Booklist

"A story of delicacy and not a little humor. The result is that literary rarity: a page-turner of real intelligence, [with] the sort of setting that even Graham Greene might have found too seedy for fiction [and] a finale that is as poignant as it is heart-stopping. A master story-teller has done it again." --David Robson, Sunday Telegraph

"Port Mungo is a tale of death and incest in the mangrove swamps off the Gulf of Honduras [where Jack Rathbone and Vera Savage] set up home, have two daughters, and fight, drink, cheat, sweat, have sex, paint, and psychologically torture each other, often before breakfast."--Tim Adams, The Observer (London)

Patrick McGrath lives with his wife, Maria Aitken, in New York and London.