Michael, a retired bridge engineer, has lived away from Ireland for most of his life and now resides alone in Bilbao after the death of his girlfriend, Catherine. Each day he listens to two versions of the same piece of music before walking the same route to visit Richard Serra's enormous permanent installation, The Matter of Time, in the Guggenheim Museum. Over the course of an hour before he leaves his apartment, Michael reflects on past projects, the landscapes of his adolescence, and his relationship with Catherine, which acts as the marker by which he judges the passing of time. Over the course of the narrative, certain fascinations appear: electricity, porcelain, the bogland of his youth, a short story by Robert Walser, and a five-year period of prolonged mental agitation experienced while living with Catherine in Leipzig. This 'sabbatical', brought on by the suicide of a former colleague, splits his career as an engineer into two distinct parts. A Sabbatical in Leipzig is intensely realistic. With a clear voice and precise, structured thoughts, we move between memories of vast empty landscapes and memories of the failed and successful edifices and bridges Michael designed throughout Europe and India.. This narrator has left the void of his world in rural Ireland to build new environments elsewhere, yet remains connected to his homeland. Duncan's second novel stands alone as a substantial and compelling work of literary fiction
