Xstabeth

Inspiring and brilliant

Kavus Torabi

XSTABETH is special. A ghostly shimmer of a novel

Kevin Williamson

You can lose yourself in the novel's weird loops and whorls, searching for resolution while luxuriating in the lack of it . . . This is Keenan's most gnomic, gnostic work yet - at times it seems only loosely tethered to reality - yet it's never portentous. There's something here of the 19th-century Russian novelists' passion for authenticity, their fervid drama. There are funny lines, too, which undercut the mysticism in a satisfyingly earthy way . . . the sense of a synchronous world being created even as you read, where past visions spark memories that echo the present, leaping across synaptic gaps with the grace of a bird in flight

Guardian

As close to a song as any prose work I've read. And Keenan is gloriously, unfashionably mystical in his approach

Irish Times

It is one of the most interesting novels I've come across this year. Reading it, I felt the unmistakable pulse of something living, and it isn't done with me yet

Literary Review

In a record shop in St Andrews, Aneliya and her father come across a Russian pressing of the Xstabeth record. The man behind the counter puts it on. "Pure loner folk," he says admiringly. "A genre of one." The same might be said of this gloriously sui generis novel

Financial Times

The prose has a mesmeric quality... Xstabeth reprises the manic idealism of This is Memorial Device (2017), Keenan's exuberant debut novel about the post-punk scene in 1980s Airdrie. Tomasz, a disciple of Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake, cuts a brooding but sympathetic figure

Spectator

One of the most exciting new writers around.

Daily Mail

The pleasures of Xstabeth lie in the ways in which the inventive Keenan plays with language and form

The i

Tautly edited, the sheer stylistic euphoria of Keenan's form seems to breathe itself to life . . . XSTABETH is a psychedelic circle from darness into light

Irish Times

It is one of the most interesting novels I have come across this year. Reading it, I felt the unmistakable pulse of something living, and it isn't done with me yet

Literary Review

Though possessed of a driving intensity and an abundance of ideas, his prose never feels didactic or dry. It's an invitation to share in what he feels - as raw, warm, bloody and poignant as it is intellectually engaged

Scotsman

Buzzing with energy and manic idealism, Xstabeth is a wild ride that shatters expectation

Dazed

Keenan's hot streak continues with this bold effort that travels between St. Andrews and Russia, taking in on the metaphysics of golf and the power of art and music

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