#BlogTour Nick by Michael Farris Smith

 It's a pleasure to take part in the BlogTour Nick by Michael Farris Smith. - 'September marks the 125th Anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Birth - Nick Carraway steps out of the shadows and into the spotlight in this exhilarating prequel to The Great Gatsby, leading up to Carraway’s meeting with the enigmatic Jay Gatsby.'

About the Author

No Exit Press also publish Michael Farris Smith’s novels The Fighter, Desperation Road and most recently Blackwood. Farris Smith has been a finalist for the Gold Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix des Lectrices in France, and his essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and daughters. Follow @michael_f_smith on Twitter, Visit michaelfarrissmith.com

About the book

This rich and imaginative novel from critically acclaimed author Michael Farris Smith breathes new life into a character that many know only from the periphery. Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby’s world, he was at the centre of a very different story – one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick embarks on a redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance – doomed from the very beginning – to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence.

NICK is an inspired concept realised with delicate, rhythmic prose, profound characterisation and deep emotion. Charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak, and profound yearning to transfix even the heartiest of golden age scribes, NICK reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades.

Review

First and foremost I now have to go back and read The Great Gatsby again in order for this prequel of sorts to find a better lace in my reading experience and literary consciousness - Nick Carraway before he meets Jay Gatsby, the story previously untold.

The author makes a really interesting point in the foreword, which is probably something readers who go back to the same books now and again will be aware of. Your reading experience is always subjective and always seen through your own frame of reference. Those frame of references change depending on what age or stage of life you are currently in. It changes the way you interpret and experience the words you are reading.

Take that concept and adapt it to a book of notable literary fame and then consider the experience. The awed young reader, becomes the disenchanted one and the older reader is perhaps the one who comprehends as never before. It's an incredibly insightful thought. Now combine that with the fictional backstory of  a character from The Great Gatsby, hence now needing to read the GG again.

It absolutely helps that the author does this with an astute emotional connection to Nick, the prose is both lyrical and at times brutally frank, which lends itself to the creation of a beautiful piece of work. It's an homage to the work of scribes of the golden age.

Buy Nick at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher ‏: ‎No Exit Press; pub date 24 Sept. 2021. Buy at Amazon com.