Signal And Noise

'Capacious, gutsy and gratifying'Joseph O'Connor, author of Star of the Sea

A riveting read - big, bold, rambunctious and very rewarding

Griesemer's energetic plotting and prose mirror the vigour of the age he describes

Ambition, failure, triumph, love, betrayal, farce, and spirt-conjuring - these are some of the subjects powerfully animated in this grand novel. John Griesemer is a masterful writer

Griesemer's novel has the courage of ambition and deserves serious praise for that alone

Joseph O'Connor, author of STAR OF THE SEA

John Griesemer's fiction has been published in Glimmertrain, Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review and elsewhere.  He has worked as a mental hospital orderly, a fisherman and a journalist.  He is an actor and has appeared on and off Broadway and in television and film, including Malcolm X, Days of Thunder, and The Crucible.  He lives with his family in New Hampshire.  His first novel, No One Thinks of Greenland, was published by Black Swan in May 2002.

On a dark, wet London morning in 1857, Chester Ludlow, an American engineer, arrives on the muddy banks of the Isle of Dogs to witness the launch of the largest steamship ever built, Isambard Kingdom Brunel's The Great Eastern.        Ludlow, propelled by fierce ambition, is a key member of a small consortium whose ambition is to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. He has abandoned his fragile wife, Franny, on their estate in Maine. The couple are still in deep mourning for their daughter who died in a tragic accident, aged only four.       The charismatic Ludlow meets a woman who will exert the most powerful influence on his life and work - the beautiful and enigmatic Katerina Lindt.      As both Ludlow and Franny's lives start to unravel, they find themselves caught up in a relentless tide of change crashing across both continents and blurring the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual worlds.

John Griesemer

'A fever-dream of a book, destined to become a Cold War classic'

'A novel with a distinctive cutting vision...[Its] immediate ancestor is Catch-22'

1959. The Korean War has been over for six years. Corporal Rudy Spruance, thanks to a little hometown trouble, has just enlisted in the U.S. Army. 
 
The next thing he knows he is being savaged by mosquitoes in one of the most remote places in the world, a military hospital in Qangattarsa, Greenland that doesn't officially exist. "You'll want to scratch," he is told when he wakes up in one of the beds. But Rudy wants to do more than scratch. He wants to know what this strange place is for and why he's there. 
 
And then he discovers the Wing. The Wing is a room of dead people who are still alive - the remnants of American soldiers in Korea whose hearts somehow still beat, men who have been reduced to mere portions of humans. They are too damaged to ever send home and their families believe them gone. It's the most peaceful place Rudy has ever been, and he befriends the only mentally coherent inhabitant, Guy X. 
 
Rudy also falls in love with Irene, a sergeant. And he finds himself starting up a base newspaper. And all the time the days are getting shorter. Soon the Stark Raving Dark of permanent night will be upon them all. As things degenerate and the future of Qangattarsa and the men who live their strange half-lives there becomes increasingly doubtful, Rudy realises he must find a way to save the people he loves - and himself. 
 
This is a moving, powerful and very funny portrait of human absurdity and tragedy that joins Catch-22 as a classic of its kind.

John Griesemer

Praise for No-One Thinks Of Greenland

'A fever-dream of a book, destined to become a Cold War classic'

'Quirky, affecting and powerful'

'A novel with a distinctive cutting vision...[Its] immediate ancestor is Catch-22'

'A fever-dream of a book, destined to become a Cold War classic'

'Quirky, affecting and powerful'

'A novel with a distinctive cutting vision...[Its] immediate ancestor is Catch-22'

'A fever-dream of a book, destined to become a Cold War classic'

'Quirky, affecting and powerful'

'A novel with a distinctive cutting vision...[Its] immediate ancestor is Catch-22'

Books by John Griesemer

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