"Colorful detours into native lore, such as a rich Dutchman’s fabled courtship of a local beauty, strike grace notes that echo Marquez
readers
will be rewarded with the little-known tale of how the underdog country demanded its own place in the 20th century."
-- Publishers Weekly
"However unusual this revolution is, it is a prelude to Anguilla’s eventual divorce from St. Kitts and Nevis, before becoming a separate British territory; its unconventional LOL factor could diversify an elective college course on revolutions with something bloody peaceful."
--New Pages
“ The Night of the Rambler is revolutionary, a reliquary, an impressionist tale of men who are by turns melancholy, raging, and often comic, their voices unique to this place and given a singular story.”
--Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here
"This is a fine novel, a surprising novel, perhaps the first true novel I have read about the nature of revolutions. The Night of the Rambler is ambitious, smart, and successful. It raises all sorts of questions about what revolutions want, how revolutions fail, and why revolutions are necessary--challenging all the while how history remembers them."
--Percival Everett, author of Erasure
" The Night of the Rambler is exceptional. Riveting, deeply thoughtful, and constantly inventive, Montague Kobbé's novel is part literary thriller, part revolutionary study, part epic historical narrative. Altogether, it makes for one profound read."
--Joe Meno, author of Office Girl and Hairstyles of the Damned
A sympathetic and often humorous account of an obscure episode in the history of the remote island of Anguilla, in the northeast Caribbean, The Night of the Rambler revolves around a haphazard attempt by a dozen or so locals to invade neighboring St. Kitts in an effort to topple the government of the recently established Associated State of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla.
Ostensibly, the action maps the fifteen hours that lapse between the moment when the "rebels" board The Rambler , the thirty-five-foot motorboat that will take them across the strait to St. Kitts, and the break of dawn the following day, when it becomes obvious that the unaccomplished mission will have to be aborted. The novel is at turns highly dramatic and hilarious, all the while bringing deep honesty to the often-unexamined righteousness of revolution.
With echoes of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children , Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , and Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral , the novel presents an intricate pattern of subtly related anecdotes woven together by a handful of rich and complex characters.
Montague Kobbé was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and for the past decade has resided at different times in Bristol, Leeds, London, and Munich. He has had close ties to the Caribbean island of Anguilla, the setting for his debut novel, for over twenty-five years. He maintains a regular literary column in the WEEKender supplement of Sint Maarten's Daily Herald and his work has been published in Anguilla, Antigua, Trinidad and Tobago, Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
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