Communion Town

Through ten subtly linked stories, Sam Thompson captures the essence of a city’s life in this accomplished, stylish debut.

Every city is made of stories: stories that meet and diverge, stories of the commonplace and the strange, of love and crime, of ghosts and monsters. This is the story of a place that never looks the same way twice: a place imagined anew by each citizen who walks through the changing streets, among voices half-heard, signs half-glimpsed and desires half acknowledged. This is the story of a city.

"Dazzling… What Communion Town renders with stunning and often heartbreaking lucidity is the complexity of consciousness itself… an elegant and hauntingly beautiful book."   –  The New York Times Book Review

"Sam Thompson’s city is made of stories, curling recursively around a sense of loss, a haunting, a mysterious gap in his characters’ sense of themselves. Dissociated and puzzled, they find themselves nevertheless – and often each other too. Thompson’s other talent is to be able to construct our world out of what appears to be a repeating nightmare and, against the odds, find something good in it. Communion Town sucks the reader in. It is a disconcerting but compelling location for genuinely human truths."  -  M. John Harrison

Sam Thompson is a critic and university literature and creative writing teacher as well as a novelist and is fascinated by the craft of writing. The Beckett-grandparental link found form in his second novel, Jott (2018), in which, aided by real letters between the two men, he examined their friendship in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Communion Town, he says, ‘is overtly a patchwork and an experiment’ in which ‘various voices tell various stories, and the idea is that they’re mutually incompatible — they belong to different genre worlds'.