The Viaduct

A political prisoner, A., has just been released from a long term of imprisonment for writing a seditious book. Fearing re-arrest, he leaves town, setting off on foot along a disused railway track running over a huge viaduct that looms over the city. As his journey progresses through a surreal and nightmarish landscape, he passes through strange towns and villages and meets other travelers following the same path for reasons of their own, with his pursuers always at his heels. A. does not know what awaits him at the terminus of the railroad line, and the ultimate horrific revelation of what lies at the end of his journey will linger with the reader long after finishing the book.

The Viaduct (1983), the first novel by David Wheldon (1950-2021), was chosen by Graham Greene and William Trevor as the winner of the Triple First Award and earned praise from critics on both sides of the Atlantic, who compared it to the works of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. A haunting, enigmatic novel told in a stark prose style that reinforces the book's surreal, dreamlike quality, it is a story that is both compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking. This reissue of Wheldon's cult classic is the first in decades and features a new introduction by Aiden O'Reilly.