On Bullfighting

Bullfighting – this complicated, repellent, fascinating, grotesque, sacramental, ugly, ritualistic, haphazard and blasphemous fight. Hemingway, Conrad and Lorca have all written about it, now it’s the turn of acclaimed novelist AL Kennedy. Unpeeling the layers she looks beyond the theatre, the costume, the erotic dance and the well-worn plot and focuses on the fact that a man faces his death while a crowd looks on.

‘On Bullfighting casts an unofficial eye over a world of male exploit; the public spectacles are treated with a fresh particularity, the inner landscapes of pain with an ardent, high-risk honesty’ Julian Barnes

‘informative, minutely observed and beautifully written’ Dea Birkett, THE INDEPENDENT

Kennedy notches up another incisive hit Brutal, brittle and brilliant’ THE LIST, Glasgow

“Odd, beautiful and moving, On Bullfighting is one of the best books of the year’ Jeanette Winterson