Notts

the long version

Two American innocents abroad, one a mild-mannered assistant professor of Stereotype on his way to an Orwell conference in Nottingham commemorating the end of 1984 and the other a fiery graduate student on her way to study the National Union of Miners' ongoing mining strike, meet aboard a 747 as it wings them to England where they experience Thatcherism at full tide and where their romantic entanglement proves disastrous. William O'Rourke's fourth novel illuminates the gap between academic "political" concerns and the realpolitik of labor disputes and international terrorism, as well as the notions of duplicatous texts and fictions within fictions, the novel of manners versus the novel of action. What is stereotyping but fear of ambiguity? O'Rourke asks indelibly in this postmodern anti-thriller thriller.