What do you think?
Rate this book
Shot
Book by Sarah Quigley
- GenresFiction
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
1 person is currently reading
37 people want to read
About the author
Sarah Quigley
25 books26 followersThere is more than one author with this name
Born in New Zealand, Sarah Quigley is a novelist and non-fiction writer. She has a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Her work has been widely published and she has received several high-profile awards.
She has published several novels, two collections of short fiction and poetry, and a creative writing manual. Her new novel, The Conductor, tells the story of the writing of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and its historic performance in besieged Leningrad in 1942.
Quigley lives and works in Berlin.
Born in New Zealand, Sarah Quigley is a novelist and non-fiction writer. She has a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. Her work has been widely published and she has received several high-profile awards.
She has published several novels, two collections of short fiction and poetry, and a creative writing manual. Her new novel, The Conductor, tells the story of the writing of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony and its historic performance in besieged Leningrad in 1942.
Quigley lives and works in Berlin.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 23, 2019
The story follows the life of a Polish American woman in California and Alaska. It's clever and well written. Too clever at times, for instance the dialogue from the bullet is just distracting, it seems like a pointless gimmick. That's a shame, because most of the book feels honest and real, if somewhat quirky.
The characters are engaging but so eccentric that they're only just plausible. For example does the spectacularly ordinary brother have to end up on an astronaut training mission? Fortunately the prose is good enough that I bought into him and the others ... but it was close. The main thing that kept me on-side was that this book has a heart. Despite all of the weirdness, the things matter are human connections. That leads to some sharp statements, about fame and the comedy business that are lightly dropped into the story without being laboured, "She thinks of dust, of long dusty roads and lost landscapes: of faces that are not always animated and bodies that are not Hollywood-perfect.
Not perfect, but pretty good. recommended with a small "r"
The characters are engaging but so eccentric that they're only just plausible. For example does the spectacularly ordinary brother have to end up on an astronaut training mission? Fortunately the prose is good enough that I bought into him and the others ... but it was close. The main thing that kept me on-side was that this book has a heart. Despite all of the weirdness, the things matter are human connections. That leads to some sharp statements, about fame and the comedy business that are lightly dropped into the story without being laboured, "She thinks of dust, of long dusty roads and lost landscapes: of faces that are not always animated and bodies that are not Hollywood-perfect.
Not perfect, but pretty good. recommended with a small "r"
July 15, 2023
Unusual way of telling a story but well written. Enjoyed it
July 15, 2012
Review published in the New Zealand Herald, 8 March 2003
Shot
Sarah Quigley
(Virago, $34.95)
Reviewed by Philippa Jamieson
The vibrant cover of Sarah Quigley's latest novel is a photo of a young woman, skirt billowing against a blue sky, and a small jet plane high above that seems to fly from her hand. It conveys the essence of Shot: someone snapped in an instant of action – from this image we can speculate who she is and what is her journey.
Set in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Alaska, the novel is both frolicsome and reflective, and features a memorable heroine. Lena Domanski, the youngest of a Polish immigrant family, is a professional comedian. In the opening paragraph she is shot in the head by a stray bullet – wrong time, wrong place – and her life flashes before her eyes.
The novel is structured in three parts: before, during and after the shooting. In the first part Lena recalls her childhood in the seedy Tenderloin district of San Francisco; the second part, all of three pages, her fleeting thoughts when the bullet hits; and the third part, how her life changes after that moment. It's a neat framework, allowing the establishment of characters and setting, the story then gaining momentum after the shooting.
Quigley affectionately portrays Lena's family as an idiosyncratic bunch, with a tinge of the surreal that reminded me of Salman Rushdie. Lena's doting father, Mr Domanski, is preoccupied with amateur theatre, full of bad jokes, and establishes a chain of Polish restaurants. Mrs Domanski is an unfulfilled housewife yearning for Poland, who takes up dancing and then a career in cosmetics. Lena's stroppy sister Bella is a taxidermist, critical but loyal. For her brother 'Delayed' Davey, a childhood obsession with making tinfoil rockets metamorphoses into its logical adult equivalent.
Lena herself is a mix: she's very much her own person – she becomes a vegetarian at a young age – but is also influenced by others. Her career in comedy begins at age seven, in an hilarious episode when she performs a dance at the Polish Sausage (her father's eatery) and accidentally sets her bottom on fire. From then on this rather solemn and thoughtful girl is 'forced into a lifetime of funniness' – people find humour in her very seriousness.
Each character has a distinctive voice, and indeed even the voices have lives of their own: 'a voice like a dying wave on a stony beach', or 'her voice was so tiny that it rolled under the wheels of the traffic and was gone.' And every now and then the bullet chimes in, alternately whispering, whining, threatening, asserting itself in the text.
Lena's brush with death changes her life dramatically – she realises with stark clarity that she can no longer be a comedian, and takes up photography instead. As a child she coveted her brother's camera. 'For if she knew one thing already, it was this: to see differently is everything. An escape, a gift, a burden, but always valuable, and the reason that poets and dreamers wake up in the mornings. And so she began to train her eyes to do the job instead. Snap! A blink with both eyes, or a wink with one, and in that instant – for an instant – life would be stilled.' Scattered through the book are 'freeze frame' paragraphs, describing a person as if in a photograph. Of course the title refers to both gunshot and snapshot.
Perhaps as a way of coming to terms with her own loss, Lena takes pictures of others who have suffered a loss. Her journey takes her to Alaska, where she stays with a tracker and a mute child found alone in the wilderness. One by one, all the characters lose something – a career, a wife, a family, an ear, but against the backdrop of silent snow Lena comes to realise that loss can give way to gain.
Shot is an adventurous development in Sarah Quigley's fiction. Being set entirely in the United States, with no connection to New Zealand, it's as if the author's imagination was set completely free to roam. Apart from the odd out-of-place phrase (referring to US dollars, for example), the language hums and sparks, rich with metaphor and simile, wrapped around fluid dialogue, and propelled along by plenty of action to keep readers on their toes.
Shot
Sarah Quigley
(Virago, $34.95)
Reviewed by Philippa Jamieson
The vibrant cover of Sarah Quigley's latest novel is a photo of a young woman, skirt billowing against a blue sky, and a small jet plane high above that seems to fly from her hand. It conveys the essence of Shot: someone snapped in an instant of action – from this image we can speculate who she is and what is her journey.
Set in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Alaska, the novel is both frolicsome and reflective, and features a memorable heroine. Lena Domanski, the youngest of a Polish immigrant family, is a professional comedian. In the opening paragraph she is shot in the head by a stray bullet – wrong time, wrong place – and her life flashes before her eyes.
The novel is structured in three parts: before, during and after the shooting. In the first part Lena recalls her childhood in the seedy Tenderloin district of San Francisco; the second part, all of three pages, her fleeting thoughts when the bullet hits; and the third part, how her life changes after that moment. It's a neat framework, allowing the establishment of characters and setting, the story then gaining momentum after the shooting.
Quigley affectionately portrays Lena's family as an idiosyncratic bunch, with a tinge of the surreal that reminded me of Salman Rushdie. Lena's doting father, Mr Domanski, is preoccupied with amateur theatre, full of bad jokes, and establishes a chain of Polish restaurants. Mrs Domanski is an unfulfilled housewife yearning for Poland, who takes up dancing and then a career in cosmetics. Lena's stroppy sister Bella is a taxidermist, critical but loyal. For her brother 'Delayed' Davey, a childhood obsession with making tinfoil rockets metamorphoses into its logical adult equivalent.
Lena herself is a mix: she's very much her own person – she becomes a vegetarian at a young age – but is also influenced by others. Her career in comedy begins at age seven, in an hilarious episode when she performs a dance at the Polish Sausage (her father's eatery) and accidentally sets her bottom on fire. From then on this rather solemn and thoughtful girl is 'forced into a lifetime of funniness' – people find humour in her very seriousness.
Each character has a distinctive voice, and indeed even the voices have lives of their own: 'a voice like a dying wave on a stony beach', or 'her voice was so tiny that it rolled under the wheels of the traffic and was gone.' And every now and then the bullet chimes in, alternately whispering, whining, threatening, asserting itself in the text.
Lena's brush with death changes her life dramatically – she realises with stark clarity that she can no longer be a comedian, and takes up photography instead. As a child she coveted her brother's camera. 'For if she knew one thing already, it was this: to see differently is everything. An escape, a gift, a burden, but always valuable, and the reason that poets and dreamers wake up in the mornings. And so she began to train her eyes to do the job instead. Snap! A blink with both eyes, or a wink with one, and in that instant – for an instant – life would be stilled.' Scattered through the book are 'freeze frame' paragraphs, describing a person as if in a photograph. Of course the title refers to both gunshot and snapshot.
Perhaps as a way of coming to terms with her own loss, Lena takes pictures of others who have suffered a loss. Her journey takes her to Alaska, where she stays with a tracker and a mute child found alone in the wilderness. One by one, all the characters lose something – a career, a wife, a family, an ear, but against the backdrop of silent snow Lena comes to realise that loss can give way to gain.
Shot is an adventurous development in Sarah Quigley's fiction. Being set entirely in the United States, with no connection to New Zealand, it's as if the author's imagination was set completely free to roam. Apart from the odd out-of-place phrase (referring to US dollars, for example), the language hums and sparks, rich with metaphor and simile, wrapped around fluid dialogue, and propelled along by plenty of action to keep readers on their toes.
December 6, 2010
It's obvious Quigley is a poet. She has picked each word in this book with precision, and her care has turned it into a beautifully crafted novel and loss, and love, and life. Each part ties seemlessly together, though they seem completely different at first glance - the childhood of a daughter of Polish immigrants in San Francisco, the recovery of a reluctant comedian from a bullet wound, and a story of finding what is lost in Alaska, and the things you lose that you can't recover.
May 31, 2015
Shot by Sarah Quigley I gave up on this as banal and indulgent.
The characters were two dimensional and lacked any kind of depth or credibility. I had to go back and check that this wasn't a children's book. I'd guess that a mental age of nine would be all you need for this book.Sorry to be so brutal but that's how I found it
The characters were two dimensional and lacked any kind of depth or credibility. I had to go back and check that this wasn't a children's book. I'd guess that a mental age of nine would be all you need for this book.Sorry to be so brutal but that's how I found it
May 14, 2013
I finished this book thinking "what was the point of all that??"
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews