Tell
Curtis Doyle, a self-made businessman and art collector, has vanished from his palatial home in the Scottish Highlands. In the wake of his disappearance, the woman who worked as his gardener is interviewed for a possible film about her employer.
A work of strange and intoxicating immediacy, exploring wealth, the art world, and the intimacy and distance between social classes, Tell is a probing and complex examination of the ways in which we make stories of our own lives and of other people’s.
About the author
Jonathan Buckley is a writer and editor from the West Midlands, now living in Brighton. In 2015 he won the BBC National Short Story Award for ‘Briar Road’, and he is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement.
Tell is his twelfth novel. His previous novels were published by Sort Of Books in the UK, and NYRB in the US. Tell was the joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize, a global, biennial award for a book-length work of literary fiction written in English, and was selected from close to 1,000 submissions.
Judge Xiaolu Guo on Tell
"For the reader, it is as if we have our ear pressed against a keyhole, listening, or are flies on a wall, witnessing events that seem to portend some momentous revelation about a man.
"Tell is a relentlessly truthful and absorbing tale about the human condition and a searing account of the complexity of life in the modern world. Employing the simplest of narrative devices but used in the most innovative ways, Jonathan Buckley has produced a profound work of fiction."