Description
Book SynopsisIn a well-appointed examination in London, a young woman unburdens herself to a certain Dr Seligman. Though she can barely see above his head, she holds forth about her life and desires, and her struggles with her sexuality and identity. Born and raised in Germany, she has been living in London for several years, determined to break free from her family origins and her haunted homeland. In a monologue that is both razor-sharp and subversively funny, she takes us on a wide-ranging journey from outre sexual fantasies and overbearing mothers to the medicinal properties of squirrel tails and the enduring legacy of shame. With
The Appointment, her audacious debut novel, Katharina Volckmer challenges our notions of what is fluid and what is fixed and injects a dose of Bernhardian snark into contemporary British fiction.
Trade Review‘Surprising, inventive, disturbing and beautiful – The Appointment is an overdue, radical intervention.’
— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
‘Katharina Volckmer is a risk-taker of the first degree. Her monologue is of hypnotic, lyrical invention and wit, coruscating self-loathing, profound pessimism and fragile hope. As dark and brilliant as 'The Naked Lunch. The Appointment is also mesmerisingly beautiful.’
— Ian McEwan, author of The Cockroach
‘Katharina Volckmer’s debut, The Appointment, is the most audacious novel I have read in years.[...It] is horribly funny and shockingly good; if the best writing takes a risk, this is Russian roulette.’
— Frances Wilson, TLS
‘The Appointment is a wonderful first novel – at once savage and precise, hypercomical and furious. It has all the authority of true chutzpah.’
— Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid & Cute
‘The Appointment is an incredible debut; utterly compelling, its vibrant, incisive voice surprises and enlivens the reader on every page. It’s darkly hilarious, moving and original. I loved it.’
— Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy
‘A book destined to enter the list of great monologues of literary history. If Dostoevsky’s underground man had read both Thomas Bernhard and Maggie Nelson, he might have conjured something as brave as this.’
— Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History
‘The Appointment is transgressive, spiky, full of ideas but astonishingly light-footed, written in beautiful, unsettling prose, and very, very funny – in short, everything a novel should be.’
— Adam Biles, author of Feeding Time
‘Katharina Volckmer is a wild new talent, and unlike, say, twentieth-century Europe, The Appointment succeeds in justifying its obscenities.’
— Joshua Cohen, author of The Book of Numbers
‘Audacious... hilariously funny. The prose is immaculate, she captures you, buttonholes you from the very first page... It is better than it has any right to be for a first book.’
— John Mitchinson, Backlisted
