His short TV film, Obsessions: Writing, was broadcast by the BBC and published by BBC Publications in 1991. His 90 minute radio play, The Journal of Simon Owen, was commissioned by the BBC and twice broadcast on Radio 4 in June, 1982. His stage play, Week Nothing, toured Scotland in 1980. Palliser has also written for the theatre, radio, and television.

He has published four novels which have been translated into a dozen languages. In 1990 he gave up his university post to become a full-time writer when his first novel, The Quincunx, became an international best-seller. He taught creative writing during the Spring semester of 1986 at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He was the first Deputy Editor of The Literary Review when it was founded in 1979. in 1975 for a dissertation on Modernist fiction.įrom 1974 until 1990, Palliser was a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He attended Oxford University in 1967 to read English Language and Literature, and took a First in June 1970. He is the elder brother of the late author and freelance journalist Marcus Palliser.īorn in New England, Palliser is an American citizen, but has lived in the United Kingdom since the age of three. Quintuple the length of the ordinary novel, this extraordinary tour de force also has five times the ordinary allotment of adventure, action and aplomb.Ĭharles Palliser (born December 11, 1947) is an American-born, British-based novelist. The quincunx of the title is a heraldic figure of five parts that appears at crucial points within the text (the number five recurs throughout the novel, which itself is divided into five parts, one for each of the family galaxies whose orbits the narrator is pulled into). The suspension of disbelief happens easily, as the reader is led through twisted family trees and plot lines. The protagonist, a young man naive enough to be blind to all clues about his own hidden history (and to the fact that his very existence is troubling to all manner of evildoers) narrates a story of uncommon beauty which not only brings readers face-to-face with dozens of piquantly drawn characters at all levels of 19th-century English society but re-creates with precision the tempestuous weather and gnarly landscape that has been a motif of the English novel since Wuthering Heights.

The quincunx book review