High Dive

By: Jonathan Lee

Narrated by: Doyle Gerard

Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Taking us inside one of the 20th century's most ambitious assassination attempts - "making history personal", as one character puts it - High Dive moves between the luxurious hospitality of a British tourist town and the troubled city of Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the height of the armed struggle between the Irish Republican Army and those loyal to the UK government.

Jonathan Lee has been described as "a major new voice in British fiction" (Guardian), and here, in supple prose that makes room for laughter as well as tears, he offers a darkly intimate portrait of how the ordinary unfolds into tragedy.

©2016 Jonathan Lee. Recorded by arrangement with Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Critic reviews

"With wry wit and profound tenderness, Jonathan Lee's High Dive highlights the tensions - between hope and heartbreak, struggle and surrender - at the intersection of the mundane and the momentous. A bold, thrilling triumph of a book." (Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife)

" High Dive is a fascinating look into a troubled past. In taut scene after taut scene, with a fine style and wit among the carnage, Jonathan Lee does service to history and the novel both." (Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End)

" High Dive is a novel so smart and compassionate and beautifully written that it asks for total immersion. A reader will hold her breath for long, perfectly-paced stretches, and she will surface, dizzied, at the end." (Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies)

Humor? Not Funny.

In maybe the strangest ever labeling of a debut novel's genre, Audible classifies HIGH DIVE as Humor Fiction. The novel is set in 1984 and centered around a luxury hotel in Brighton, England, and the IRA's plant of a bomb to detonate in a hotel room therein which the criminals think is near the one in which Prime Minister Thatcher will stay upon her visit a few weeks thereafter.

The three primary characters are an 17-18 year old Irish guy from the streets of Belfast, a middle-class 17 year old British girl who works part time for the luxury hotel in question. While the teens travel in very different worlds trying to find each's respective fit, the girl's dad, Moose, who is having a mid-life existential crisis, suffers a significant physical event.

It's a thoughtful and well written novel. Really good, not great.

The publisher's book description says it's based on real events, so I'm not giving away a spoiler by saying that the bomb's explosion, a key moment in the novel, results in casualties. Thus, in spite of Audible's categorization of this novel as "Humor," you shouldn't expect a barrel of laughs.