A Dead Language - Tapa dura

From the author of the critically acclaimed Pinkerton’s Sister comes volume two of this extraordinary sequence of novels.

Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton — the faithless young naval lieutenant who abandons Madam Butterfly — was glimpsed fleetingly in Peter Rushforth's previous novel, Pinkerton's Sister. Now Ben steps out of the shadows and into the center of the stage, a young man haunted by the desolation of his boyhood years, unable to show or respond to love.

Once again, in his mastery of language, his humor, his extraordinary imagination, and his superb sense of time and place, Peter Rushforth has given the world another masterpiece, ranking alongside, or surpassing, his earlier triumphs.

Peter Rushforth’s brilliant first novel, Kindergarten, was published in 1979 and won the Hawthornden Prize, awarded to the best work of imaginative literature. After an absence of twenty-five years he returned to the literary scene in 2004 with the epic novel Pinkerton’s Sister, which charmed critics at the Washington Post, New Yorker, and San Francisco Chronicle, and was named a BookSense selection in March 2005. In the fall of 2005 Rushforth finished a sequel to Pinkerton’s Sister, an elegant novel entitled A Dead Language.

Sadly, after making his final revisions to his work, Peter Rushforth passed away while walking on the Yorkshire Moors. A Dead Language was published posthumously in the U.K. by Simon & Schuster.