That Little Thread

‘What is there like fortitude?’ the American poet Marianne Moore asks in her poem, ‘Nevertheless’, from which John Lucas’s new novel takes its title. 

Peter Simpson, recently promoted to professor at a Midlands university, finds himself early one evening confronted by a man he hasn’t met for some twenty years and with whom he has no wish to renew acquaintance. Terry DeVine, a pushy youth from the south, had gone off with one of Simpson’s favourite students, a brilliant young woman who disappeared from the university without taking her degree and who, Simpson later heard, had died in giving birth to a daughter. 

What he doesn’t and can’t guess is why the father of that child should now choose to reappear. 

Discovering the answer to this question and, in the process unearthing much else besides about both young lovers, is at the heart of the stories, as compelling as they are tragic, which run through That Little Thread. 

About the author: 

John Lucas is a poet, novelist, biographer, critic, and essayist. His 92 Acharnon Street won the Dolman Best Travel Book Award (2008), and The Awkward Squad: Rebels in English Cricket was shortlisted for the 2015 Cricket Writers’ Best Book of the Year. 

Among other recent books are A Brief History of Whistling (with Allan Chatburn), George Crabbe: A Critical Study and Portable Property: Poems, the latter two published by Greenwich Exchange, as are all his novels. He is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Hotel of Dreams (Plas Gwyn Books). He is Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent. 

No of Pages: 188 pp 

ISBN: 978-1-910996-67-6