Feast Days

Feast Days
Ian Mackenzie

A taut, powerful and profound novel about a young woman who follows her husband to Sao PauloSo. We were Americans abroad. We weren’t the doomed travellers in a Paul Bowles novel, and we weren’t the idealists or the malarial, religion-damaged burnouts in something by Greene; but we were people far from home nevertheless. Our naivety didn’t have political consequences. We had G.P.S. in our smartphones. I don’t think we were alcoholics. Our passports were in the same drawer as our collection of international adapters, none of which seemed to fit in Brazilian wall sockets. My husband was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a rich man, and idealism was never my vice.I was ancillary – a word that comes from the Latin for ‘having the status of a female slave’. That’s the sort of thing I know, and it tells you something about how I misspent my education. The term among expats for people like me was ‘trailing spouse’ . . .

Copyright (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Ian MacKenzie 2018

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover photograph © plainpicture/Aurora Photos/Robert Benson

Ian MacKenzie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008298548

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008306540

Version: 2018-06-12

Praise (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)

‘This brilliant novel has no time for platitudes or conventional, ankle-deep morality; it plunges us straight to the depths. I’m not sure I know another book that feels at once so disaffected and so full of longing, so expansive in its sympathy and so terrifying in its candour. Devastating, funny and wise, it’s among the best novels I know about the fate of American innocence abroad’

GARTH GREENWELL

‘There is a sly, brooding intelligence at work in this novel, recalling for me the startling, highest times in American literature. MacKenzie is not just a great writer in the making – he’s already there’

BRAD WATSON

‘A beautiful, wry and honest exploration of belonging and not-belonging. The sharpness and precision with which the story is told reminded me in parts of Maggie Nelson … the prose is stunning’

SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

‘Brilliant. A pervasive sense of unrest, both large and small scale, social and personal, [is] conveyed in MacKenzie’s unruffled, discerning prose. MacKenzie has captured one of the most memorable narrative voices in recent fiction’

Publishers Weekly

‘Intelligent and atmospheric, Feast Days deftly limns the inner life of a foreigner whose own trajectory becomes increasingly bound up with the tensions and complexities of the society in which she has landed’

CHLOE ARIDJIS

‘Poignant and perceptive’

Booklist

‘The novel of the ugly American living abroad has bloomed into a genre all its own … Charles Portis’s Gringos, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper … Ian MacKenzie’s second novel arrives as a worthy addition to that list’

New York Times

‘A story about love and power, luxury and empire, set in one of the most socially stratified countries on the planet. MacKenzie’s slender novel feels heavier than many novels twice its weight’

San Francisco Chronicle

Dedication (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)

For Kelsey—

first reader of everything,

fixes the mistakes no one else has to see

Epigraph (#u7dbf1c94-a4e1-5dff-8797-a1532dca8625)

“Oh,” I said, putting my hat on. “Oh.”

—Mark Strand,

“I Will Love the Twenty-first Century”

Contents

Cover (#uf047fe9d-c82f-52f1-aace-8f30c301f673)

Title Page (#u1d1ed842-a071-5255-8555-e486c85464f0)

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph