Longlisted for The Booker Prize 2025
"Buckley creates a novel of quiet brilliance and sly humour, packed with mystery and indeterminacy."-The Booker Prize judgesAfter losing her father, Teresa returns to a small town on the Greek coast-the same place she visited when grieving her mother nine years ago. Soon, she encounters some of the people she met last time around: John, a man struggling to come to terms with the violent death of his nephew, Petros, an eccentric mechanic; Niko, a handsome diving instructor; and Xanthe, a waitress in one of the cafés on the leafy town square. They talk about their longings, regrets, the passing of time, and their sense of who they are. Artfully constructed, absorbing, and insightful, One Boat is a brilliant novel grappling with questions of identity, free will, guilt, and responsibility.
"A strange, sly and self-assured novel, in which both nothing and everything happens…There is a great deal of freight on board One Boat, but it packs so neatly into 168 pages that it never feels overburdened. This is a novel to be returned to as a place in which to think, just as Teresa returns to her Greek town."
"Teresa's story emerges in non-linear fragments of reminiscence and notebook scribbles…An understated story about selfhood emerges from the flotsam of memories and jottings. When Buckley at last pulls back the metafictional curtain in the book's final pages, he formalizes his narrator's driftings and draftings. What seems at first a set of disparate, unpolished vignettes proves to be a masterfully unified conceit."
