234 pages
182 mm x 128 mm
90 mm cover flaps
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-7384394-4-7
£14 (£3 p&p UK)
The Discreet Dash by Georgina Starr
Leaning back again on the chaise longue with something vaguely resembling cheese-dust melting on her tongue, Dora felt like a psychiatric patient about to undergo analysis, she was not at all comfortable with this new role...
It's London in 2001. The lives of two strangers, Dora and Susan become connected via a 1950s movie resulting in collective time-travel through film fictions, dreams, and hallucinatory realities. The result? A series of sonic events leading to the birth of an unknown species...
Drawing on historical female mythologies including The Legend of St Ursula, the Immaculate Conception, and ancient mother cults, The Discreet Dash is the debut novel of acclaimed visual artist Georgina Starr.
‘Captivating, compelling and beautifully written. A book exploring sound, a lost film and archaeology is my kind of book! Obsessive, strange, otherworldly: a fantastic combination of magic realism, surrealism and detective story. All the characters could be classified as outsiders, but Starr brings them to the very centre, and we get to know their fascinating compulsions. At times I began to see the book as a far-reaching/ wayward child of Leonora Carrington (THE HEARING TRUMPET) and a Patricia Highsmith animal story. Though whatever the origins and inspirations, THE DISCREET DASH remains truly original and one of a kind. I was totally absorbed, couldn’t put it down, and the conjured images, sounds and smells that pervade and sometimes jump from the pages will stay with me a long, long time.’
- Carol Morley
'blown away
folded electric drastic
a loved place or piece or place
loved but got to go there
come come to her vivid world’
- Sue Tompkins
‘An unashamed 21st-century shaman.’
- The Guardian
‘A slant-detective story as much as a queer tale of desire and repressed histories, told in prose reminiscent of Leonora Carrington herself. Hilarious and far more perverse than it first appears, Starr’s surrealist narrative is built around an empty hole, populated with mysterious larvae, esoteric magic and hazy filmic glamour; the unlikely protagonist a listening machine—‘an invisible ear, a huge self-conscious organ hiding in the shadows listening’—who slowly unravels the mystery into increasingly menacing fractals of revelation.’
-Nell Osborne
'A brilliantly sharp and very hip mystery. I love how London’s one of the main characters, a playground for the protagonist, and the intriguing, charismatic people she meets. The city (and the story) is a place of intrigue, grit, glamour and possibility, explored in sharp, cool language.'
- Bidisha, author of ‘The Future of Serious Art’.
Internationally acclaimed artist Georgina Starr has been exhibiting worldwide in galleries and museums since the early 1990s. Her artworks, which span film, sound, sculpture, writing and performance, have been described as “magically complex works that challenge the viewer to re-examine the self, the unconscious and its ever –morphing biographies through a glittering and melancholic theatre of memory, mythology and fiction.” Her recent film Quarantaine was nominated for the Jarman Award. The Discreet Dash is her debut novel.
Leaning back again on the chaise longue with something vaguely resembling cheese-dust melting on her tongue, Dora felt like a psychiatric patient about to undergo analysis, she was not at all comfortable with this new role...
It's London in 2001. The lives of two strangers, Dora and Susan become connected via a 1950s movie resulting in collective time-travel through film fictions, dreams, and hallucinatory realities. The result? A series of sonic events leading to the birth of an unknown species...
Drawing on historical female mythologies including The Legend of St Ursula, the Immaculate Conception, and ancient mother cults, The Discreet Dash is the debut novel of acclaimed visual artist Georgina Starr.
‘Captivating, compelling and beautifully written. A book exploring sound, a lost film and archaeology is my kind of book! Obsessive, strange, otherworldly: a fantastic combination of magic realism, surrealism and detective story. All the characters could be classified as outsiders, but Starr brings them to the very centre, and we get to know their fascinating compulsions. At times I began to see the book as a far-reaching/ wayward child of Leonora Carrington (THE HEARING TRUMPET) and a Patricia Highsmith animal story. Though whatever the origins and inspirations, THE DISCREET DASH remains truly original and one of a kind. I was totally absorbed, couldn’t put it down, and the conjured images, sounds and smells that pervade and sometimes jump from the pages will stay with me a long, long time.’
- Carol Morley
'blown away
folded electric drastic
a loved place or piece or place
loved but got to go there
come come to her vivid world’
- Sue Tompkins
‘An unashamed 21st-century shaman.’
- The Guardian
‘A slant-detective story as much as a queer tale of desire and repressed histories, told in prose reminiscent of Leonora Carrington herself. Hilarious and far more perverse than it first appears, Starr’s surrealist narrative is built around an empty hole, populated with mysterious larvae, esoteric magic and hazy filmic glamour; the unlikely protagonist a listening machine—‘an invisible ear, a huge self-conscious organ hiding in the shadows listening’—who slowly unravels the mystery into increasingly menacing fractals of revelation.’
-Nell Osborne
'A brilliantly sharp and very hip mystery. I love how London’s one of the main characters, a playground for the protagonist, and the intriguing, charismatic people she meets. The city (and the story) is a place of intrigue, grit, glamour and possibility, explored in sharp, cool language.'
- Bidisha, author of ‘The Future of Serious Art’.
Internationally acclaimed artist Georgina Starr has been exhibiting worldwide in galleries and museums since the early 1990s. Her artworks, which span film, sound, sculpture, writing and performance, have been described as “magically complex works that challenge the viewer to re-examine the self, the unconscious and its ever –morphing biographies through a glittering and melancholic theatre of memory, mythology and fiction.” Her recent film Quarantaine was nominated for the Jarman Award. The Discreet Dash is her debut novel.
© Joan Publishing