Xstabeth: A Novel

INCLUDES 'PREQUEL' THE TOWER THE FIELDS THE TRANSMITTERS'This book spoke, it said "read me" from the very first sentence as if it were alive, it gave me visceral joy' Kim Gordon'Reading [Xstabeth] feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music' Edna O'Brien'Prepare for more of that inimitable Keenan narrative voodoo brilliance' Wendy ErskineIn St Petersburg, Russia, Aneliya is torn between the love of her father and her father's best friend. Her father dreams of becoming a great musician but suffers with a naivete that means he will never be taken seriously. Her father's best friend has a penchant for vodka, strip clubs and moral philosophy.When an angelic presence named Xstabeth enters their lives - a presence who simultaneously fulfils and disappears those she touches - Aneliya and her father's world is transformed. Moving from Russia to St Andrews, Scotland, Xstabeth tackles the metaphysics of golf, the mindset of classic Russian novels and the power of art and music to re-wire reality. Charged with a consuming intensity and a torrential rhythm that pulses with music, it is an offering of transcendence and a love letter to the books of Chandler, Nabokov and Dostoevsky, by a writer who is rewriting the rulebook of contemporary fiction.

Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)★

“A memorable read... Music and the sacred converge in unexpected ways. Keenan explores that dynamic through a story about a father, a daughter, and the music that haunts them.”

Library Journal (Starred Review)★

“A philosophical, poetic novel... An open conversation about music and art that explores the meanings and interrelationship of synchronicity, significance, memories, mercy, and grace... The Russian soul and its attendant angst are well explored in this short novel.”

Shelf Awareness (Starred Review)

“A daring experiment that questions what fiction can and should be.”

Kim Gordon

“This book spoke, it said ‘read me’ from the very first sentence as if it were alive, it gave me visceral joy.”

Edna O’Brien, author of Girl

“Reading Xstabeth feels like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music.”

Wendy Erskine, author of Sweet Home

“Prepare for more of that inimitable Keenan narrative voodoo brilliance.”

Booklist

“Absolutely unique.”

Publishers Weekly

“[Xstabeth] will shock and delight, confuse and inspire, all in a manner that truly elevates the form.”

The New Statesman

“A ghostly continent-striding coming-of-age story.”

Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books (Portland, OR)

“A strange, ambitious book... Xstabeth is the story of a father and daughter, of memory, space, philosophizing, sex, golf, saints, fairies, more sex, Leonard Cohen, a secret band, life as performance, and, maybe most of all, music and musicality. Xstabeth is the ornate key to a lock you didn't know you were looking for (but now cannot imagine not finding).”

The Guardian

“You can lose yourself in the novel’s weird loops and whorls, searching for resolution while luxuriating in the lack of it... There’s something here of the 19th-century Russian novelists’ passion for authenticity, their fervid drama... The sense of a synchronous world being created even as you read, where past visions spark memories that echo the present, leaping across synaptic gaps with the grace of a bird in flight.”

Financial Times

“‘A genre of one.’ The same might be said of this gloriously sui generis novel.”

Literary Review

“It is one of the most interesting novels I've come across this year. Reading it, I felt the unmistakable pulse of something living, and it isn't done with me yet.”

Daily Mail (UK)

“One of the most exciting new writers around.”

About the Author

David Keenan’s This Is Memorial Device won the Collyer Bristow Award for Debut Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2017 Gordon Burn Prize. His second novel, For the Good Times won the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize. Edna O’Brien described reading his third novel, Xstabeth (Europa, 2022), as “feel[ing] like being cut open to the accompanying sound of ecstatic music.” His fourth novel, Monument Maker, will also be published by Europa. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

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