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Glitch
After two decades spent in the US, L-J is on a flight back to his native Suffolk to visit family and his childhood coastal home. His flight is straightforward, as per design, until it hits a glitch – an unexpected and dramatic cabin decompression – which suggests that all that L-J expects from this trip cannot be counted on.
This is a powerful novel of grief, family, and ideas. It’s a novel about embracing those irregularities – the recurring glitch – that seep into every aspect of life, and seeing the beauty in them.
This is a powerful novel of grief, family, and ideas. It’s a novel about embracing those irregularities – the recurring glitch – that seep into every aspect of life, and seeing the beauty in them.
- GenresFiction
Hardcover
Published September 5, 2019
118 people want to read
About the author
Lee Rourke
13 books57 followersLee Rourke is the author of the short-story collection Everyday, the novels The Canal (winner of the Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize 2010), Vulgar Things, and the poetry collections Varroa Destructor and Vantablack. His latest novel Glitch is published by Dead Ink Books. His debut novel The Canal is being adapted to film by Storyhouse Productions, summer 2020. He is Contributing Editor for 3:AM Magazine [www.3ammagazine.com]. He lives by the sea.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 1, 2021
Glitch by Lee Rourke focuses on the simplistic yet overwhelming thought that there is always a "glitch in the matrix". Slight cracks and scratches in glass will eventually result in fractured shards on the ground, a plane's slightly imbalanced structure will result in the whole metal cage falling back down to Earth. Essentially, everything in life will malfunction, and death and decay are inevitable.
After over two decades of life in America, protagonist L-J finally comes back to his hometown in the UK for hand surgery, having injured while working on a construction site. During the flight, the engine malfunctions, and the plane starts to go down as L-J reflects on this idea of a "glitch" only seconds away from his death. Fortunately, the pilot manages to land the plane in a nearby city and L-J goes home to see her mother and sister. When he gets there, he learns that no one cares about the catastrophe on the plane, because his mother is diagnosed with throat cancer. As his mother gets a tracheostomy, she loses her ability to speak and has to write what she is saying. The novel deals with the theme of family, as L-J and his mother share an extremely special bond and connect over their fascination with glitches and malfunctions. At the same time, L-J tries to reconnect with his sister and deal with their father who had abandoned them when they were young and is now trying to sneak back into their lives for money.
Wow. When I first started this book, I thought I would hate it because it was extremely slow. However, I'm extremely astonished and impressed by how well this novel captured such a small yet complex thought. I love the theme of family and childhood in this book because it is extremely prevalent especially as L-J gets to see his childhood neighborhood and home again. I love the small flashbacks to L-J's childhood because it shows such ordinary moments like a jealous sibling, but it contributes so much to this theme of family. I love how this book deals with the concept of how fragile death is, yet how normal it is. This book made me really think a lot about life, so if you're looking for a book that will give you a small identity crisis, this is the one.
After over two decades of life in America, protagonist L-J finally comes back to his hometown in the UK for hand surgery, having injured while working on a construction site. During the flight, the engine malfunctions, and the plane starts to go down as L-J reflects on this idea of a "glitch" only seconds away from his death. Fortunately, the pilot manages to land the plane in a nearby city and L-J goes home to see her mother and sister. When he gets there, he learns that no one cares about the catastrophe on the plane, because his mother is diagnosed with throat cancer. As his mother gets a tracheostomy, she loses her ability to speak and has to write what she is saying. The novel deals with the theme of family, as L-J and his mother share an extremely special bond and connect over their fascination with glitches and malfunctions. At the same time, L-J tries to reconnect with his sister and deal with their father who had abandoned them when they were young and is now trying to sneak back into their lives for money.
Wow. When I first started this book, I thought I would hate it because it was extremely slow. However, I'm extremely astonished and impressed by how well this novel captured such a small yet complex thought. I love the theme of family and childhood in this book because it is extremely prevalent especially as L-J gets to see his childhood neighborhood and home again. I love the small flashbacks to L-J's childhood because it shows such ordinary moments like a jealous sibling, but it contributes so much to this theme of family. I love how this book deals with the concept of how fragile death is, yet how normal it is. This book made me really think a lot about life, so if you're looking for a book that will give you a small identity crisis, this is the one.
September 18, 2019
Glitch : a sudden, usually temporary malfunction or fault of equipment.
Although I NEVER have any preconceptions before I read a book, I let my guard down with Glitch. For some strange reason I was expecting a sci-fi novel involving time travel.
Glitch is DEFINITELY not that.
The novel is about death but does revolve around the concept of glitches.
L-J has worked in the U.S. for over 20 years and due to a hand injury is returning to his birthplace, England. On the plane he starts to notice that there’s a glitch in the film they are showing ( which is Sorrentino’s The Consequences of Love – a fantastic movie) shortly after the plane suffers from decompression, another glitch.
From then we readers realise that glitches occur in L-J’s life. These range from tiny ones like the airline film to serious ones like his relationship with his sister Ellie, which has been severed.
L-J finds out that his mother is dying from throat cancer and while he visits her he is reminded of the glitches which appeared in his childhood. The most notable one is discovering amber on a beach (technically one can say that amber is a sort glitch of nature) and a glitchy memory of his sister hurting him when he was a baby.
Eventually another event helps L-J encounter his glitches and makes him see them in a new light.
I didn’t mind Glitch. It’s quirky but drives it’s inner message deeply. There are many tender, emotional moments and I liked the way Rourke managed to keep the book together. I cannot say though, that I embraced this novel. At times I found the writing a bit clinical (except the conclusion, that broke my heart) and I had trouble investing myself in the story. So there were mixed feelings. It still is a brave book and an original way at looking at death but I’m not sure it works that well.
Although I NEVER have any preconceptions before I read a book, I let my guard down with Glitch. For some strange reason I was expecting a sci-fi novel involving time travel.
Glitch is DEFINITELY not that.
The novel is about death but does revolve around the concept of glitches.
L-J has worked in the U.S. for over 20 years and due to a hand injury is returning to his birthplace, England. On the plane he starts to notice that there’s a glitch in the film they are showing ( which is Sorrentino’s The Consequences of Love – a fantastic movie) shortly after the plane suffers from decompression, another glitch.
From then we readers realise that glitches occur in L-J’s life. These range from tiny ones like the airline film to serious ones like his relationship with his sister Ellie, which has been severed.
L-J finds out that his mother is dying from throat cancer and while he visits her he is reminded of the glitches which appeared in his childhood. The most notable one is discovering amber on a beach (technically one can say that amber is a sort glitch of nature) and a glitchy memory of his sister hurting him when he was a baby.
Eventually another event helps L-J encounter his glitches and makes him see them in a new light.
I didn’t mind Glitch. It’s quirky but drives it’s inner message deeply. There are many tender, emotional moments and I liked the way Rourke managed to keep the book together. I cannot say though, that I embraced this novel. At times I found the writing a bit clinical (except the conclusion, that broke my heart) and I had trouble investing myself in the story. So there were mixed feelings. It still is a brave book and an original way at looking at death but I’m not sure it works that well.
October 11, 2019
Lee Rourke brings us a tale that is laced with grief and the quest for belonging, a story of loneliness and trying to find a way, an existence in this world when all you’ve anchored yourself to gets torn away. When the thing that you loved most, the thing that has shaped you, protected you, what has essentially moulded you into the very person you are today… is laying in a hospital bed, unable to speak, and hanging onto life by the most delicate of threads. Glitch and the engaging way it has been written, is what makes this a most powerful and unrelenting read.
‘It cut right through him, deep, right to the very core of his being, tearing him open right there and then. Something that had taken so long to reach them that day on the shore, something so beautifully flawed in its own forming, something which meant so much to him, to them, never returned.’
When getting Glitch I read the cover and thought, here we go, a science fiction book that sounds brilliant and right up my street (thinking it was going to be a bit like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) – I think it was the whole glitch thing – that from a glitch (in our case a decompression of an flight), everything that was on that path is now forever changed, everything you thought was going to happen had now been altered in some way and that with multiple glitches things would jump around and change (like parallel universes – separate timelines kind of thing).
And I guess for L-J, our main protagonist, it did. He was expecting to return home to his family and mother, but after that small glitch his life was changed forever – but did the glitch really cause this? Wasn’t he on his way home anyway? Wasn’t his mother sick already? Hadn’t his sister tried to call him? Did the Glitch cause this new event that was waiting for him when he landed? – lots of questions I know, and some get answered, and some don’t. But what I wanted to highlight was that this book is so much more than the jacket and blurb suggest, and in all honesty I feel that the blurb and jacket do a disservice to the words and the deeply rich story that resides within.
I was expecting one thing and Rourke delivers a completely different experience – one which is tender but powerful. One that is heartfelt, and at times unbearable in its honesty on the subject of grief. The keen eyed reader may have seen a lot of books that express grief recently, you have Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, and his new title Lanny (deals with grief in some form), then you have Andrew Cull’s Remains – you see the thing about grief is that it can appear and consume different people and manifest itself in a variety of different ways; and if we are honest, there is no escaping it. It will catch us all at some point in our lives, it will impact us in ways we were not expecting and it’s how we each cope with grief which is telling. With Glitch Rourke puts his own interpretation of grief across, which I am sure, will resonate with many people!
Rourke’s approach to Glitch is tantalisingly brilliant, his prose is delightfully crafted, and there always appears to be something bubbling below the surface, the rumbling fallout from the initial glitch. Rourke’s words enrapture the reader, and he gives us line-by-line of sweet nectar to feast ourselves on – where we drink deeply and then stumble around drunk on his brilliance, like a fly in a Venus Flytrap, knowing that it will soon snap shut and imprison us.
There is also a fragility to Rourke’s structure and prose, that you feel at any moment the whole thing will come tumbling down (it’s emotive and brave, and honest), trapping you inside this most consuming and captivating of reads. But I guess that’s what grief is like, how it contaminates, like a house of cards before one false move brings everything we’ve built, tumbling down and trapping us within the wreckage of our lives.
Glitch is a terse and poignant story about the shackles of grief and how lives are changed exponentially from the glitches that spring from the fabric of life. An interesting and deeply rich story, which has a frenetic pace and a readability that turns this into a firecracker of a book!
‘It cut right through him, deep, right to the very core of his being, tearing him open right there and then. Something that had taken so long to reach them that day on the shore, something so beautifully flawed in its own forming, something which meant so much to him, to them, never returned.’
When getting Glitch I read the cover and thought, here we go, a science fiction book that sounds brilliant and right up my street (thinking it was going to be a bit like The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) – I think it was the whole glitch thing – that from a glitch (in our case a decompression of an flight), everything that was on that path is now forever changed, everything you thought was going to happen had now been altered in some way and that with multiple glitches things would jump around and change (like parallel universes – separate timelines kind of thing).
And I guess for L-J, our main protagonist, it did. He was expecting to return home to his family and mother, but after that small glitch his life was changed forever – but did the glitch really cause this? Wasn’t he on his way home anyway? Wasn’t his mother sick already? Hadn’t his sister tried to call him? Did the Glitch cause this new event that was waiting for him when he landed? – lots of questions I know, and some get answered, and some don’t. But what I wanted to highlight was that this book is so much more than the jacket and blurb suggest, and in all honesty I feel that the blurb and jacket do a disservice to the words and the deeply rich story that resides within.
I was expecting one thing and Rourke delivers a completely different experience – one which is tender but powerful. One that is heartfelt, and at times unbearable in its honesty on the subject of grief. The keen eyed reader may have seen a lot of books that express grief recently, you have Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, and his new title Lanny (deals with grief in some form), then you have Andrew Cull’s Remains – you see the thing about grief is that it can appear and consume different people and manifest itself in a variety of different ways; and if we are honest, there is no escaping it. It will catch us all at some point in our lives, it will impact us in ways we were not expecting and it’s how we each cope with grief which is telling. With Glitch Rourke puts his own interpretation of grief across, which I am sure, will resonate with many people!
Rourke’s approach to Glitch is tantalisingly brilliant, his prose is delightfully crafted, and there always appears to be something bubbling below the surface, the rumbling fallout from the initial glitch. Rourke’s words enrapture the reader, and he gives us line-by-line of sweet nectar to feast ourselves on – where we drink deeply and then stumble around drunk on his brilliance, like a fly in a Venus Flytrap, knowing that it will soon snap shut and imprison us.
There is also a fragility to Rourke’s structure and prose, that you feel at any moment the whole thing will come tumbling down (it’s emotive and brave, and honest), trapping you inside this most consuming and captivating of reads. But I guess that’s what grief is like, how it contaminates, like a house of cards before one false move brings everything we’ve built, tumbling down and trapping us within the wreckage of our lives.
Glitch is a terse and poignant story about the shackles of grief and how lives are changed exponentially from the glitches that spring from the fabric of life. An interesting and deeply rich story, which has a frenetic pace and a readability that turns this into a firecracker of a book!
October 20, 2019
L-J is an engineer living in company owned accommodation in Hoboken, USA. For six years he worked on the national grid’s New Jersey Transmission Project until a hand injury led to him being struck off sick. He had enjoyed dangling from pylons at great heights, aspiring to be one of the linesmen who work six inches from live wires – the entire voltage running through and around them. L-J has always wanted to be a part of things, connected to the grid. Despite this, life and those he encounters wash over him. The only connection he has ever truly felt is the bond with his mother back home in England. Now she is dying.
L-J needs an operation on his hand and is offered the chance to have the procedure done in the UK where he was born and raised. He decides to return to Dunwich on the Suffolf Coast, a place he left abruptly to travel to the USA. His flight home makes headlines when it suffers a malfunction, a glitch that causes it to plummet back down to earth. As chaos erupts around him, L-J calmly reflects on his job and the people he is returning to.
“everything is already broken, everything is prone to malfunction. We spend our entire lives trying to fix things when there’s no point.”
When L-J eventually reaches London he is met by his sister, Ellen, who appears to blame him for the inconvenience of his delayed arrival. Their relationship is fractured, with a history of resentments. Ellen is married to Paul and they are worried about the financial impact of the current recession – its threat to their livelihoods. She is angry that L-J left the UK in the way he did. L-J is put out that she does not show adequate interest in and concern about the flight on which he could have died. He recalls an incident when she attacked him as a baby. Although he only knows of this through hearsay, he still harbours anger that she does not voice regret for her childish actions.
“Nobody wants to spend time examining the blips in our lives, we just hope they’ll go away, but they don’t. They remain with us, like a scar that never fades.”
L-J stays in the family home, walks along the shore, relishes the memories evoked. He sits at his mother’s hospital bedside trying to comfort her and himself. The two have always shared a closeness born of outings, art and poetry. He is her beautiful boy, reading the books she suggested as a means to retain and strengthen their connection.
“that’s the beauty of poetry, there’s nothing to understand, only something to grasp.”
“by his early teens he’d already decided that he wanted to be an engineer. Poetry, apart from serving as the living umbilical cord between him and Mother, had no other use.”
Ellen wishes to discuss practical matters and rails against her brother’s attitude and behaviour. Her priority, as she considers their mother’s imminent death, is attaining monetary security – something L-J has no interest in. He values their childhood home for visceral reasons.
This is a strangely told tale. The writing has a detached feel. The protagonist, from whose point of view it is written, is there in each moment but also in imaginings triggered by conversation or events. His musings are distracted which can be somewhat disconcerting to read.
“Everything remains just under the surface of things”
L-J’s seemingly more practical sister is living in a different reality to his. She cannot comprehend his actions, past or present, and shows her irritation. He resents her material outlook and aspects of their shared history.
In the hospital, Mother’s health continues to deteriorate. Tied to their home for this period of time, L-J looks through cupboards and drawers finding photographs and letters that fill in gaps of knowledge from the family’s past. He considers these new facts a ‘rip in the fabric of our reality’.
The glitches in L-J’s life have proved pivotal even if they did not provide what he was hoping for. It is these that he holds on to, the harness that prevents him falling from height to his demise. Whatever Ellen demands, he must find a way to cope in his own way with their mother’s death.
A story of grief and the detachment needed to survive it – the free fall suffered when connections are severed. Although not always straightforward, the reflections evoked – the understanding of human nature – linger long after the last page is turned. A poignant and original read.
L-J needs an operation on his hand and is offered the chance to have the procedure done in the UK where he was born and raised. He decides to return to Dunwich on the Suffolf Coast, a place he left abruptly to travel to the USA. His flight home makes headlines when it suffers a malfunction, a glitch that causes it to plummet back down to earth. As chaos erupts around him, L-J calmly reflects on his job and the people he is returning to.
“everything is already broken, everything is prone to malfunction. We spend our entire lives trying to fix things when there’s no point.”
When L-J eventually reaches London he is met by his sister, Ellen, who appears to blame him for the inconvenience of his delayed arrival. Their relationship is fractured, with a history of resentments. Ellen is married to Paul and they are worried about the financial impact of the current recession – its threat to their livelihoods. She is angry that L-J left the UK in the way he did. L-J is put out that she does not show adequate interest in and concern about the flight on which he could have died. He recalls an incident when she attacked him as a baby. Although he only knows of this through hearsay, he still harbours anger that she does not voice regret for her childish actions.
“Nobody wants to spend time examining the blips in our lives, we just hope they’ll go away, but they don’t. They remain with us, like a scar that never fades.”
L-J stays in the family home, walks along the shore, relishes the memories evoked. He sits at his mother’s hospital bedside trying to comfort her and himself. The two have always shared a closeness born of outings, art and poetry. He is her beautiful boy, reading the books she suggested as a means to retain and strengthen their connection.
“that’s the beauty of poetry, there’s nothing to understand, only something to grasp.”
“by his early teens he’d already decided that he wanted to be an engineer. Poetry, apart from serving as the living umbilical cord between him and Mother, had no other use.”
Ellen wishes to discuss practical matters and rails against her brother’s attitude and behaviour. Her priority, as she considers their mother’s imminent death, is attaining monetary security – something L-J has no interest in. He values their childhood home for visceral reasons.
This is a strangely told tale. The writing has a detached feel. The protagonist, from whose point of view it is written, is there in each moment but also in imaginings triggered by conversation or events. His musings are distracted which can be somewhat disconcerting to read.
“Everything remains just under the surface of things”
L-J’s seemingly more practical sister is living in a different reality to his. She cannot comprehend his actions, past or present, and shows her irritation. He resents her material outlook and aspects of their shared history.
In the hospital, Mother’s health continues to deteriorate. Tied to their home for this period of time, L-J looks through cupboards and drawers finding photographs and letters that fill in gaps of knowledge from the family’s past. He considers these new facts a ‘rip in the fabric of our reality’.
The glitches in L-J’s life have proved pivotal even if they did not provide what he was hoping for. It is these that he holds on to, the harness that prevents him falling from height to his demise. Whatever Ellen demands, he must find a way to cope in his own way with their mother’s death.
A story of grief and the detachment needed to survive it – the free fall suffered when connections are severed. Although not always straightforward, the reflections evoked – the understanding of human nature – linger long after the last page is turned. A poignant and original read.
January 20, 2020
This is a deep, beautiful novel about grief and loss and love parental love. It takes those emotions on honestly and vividly but avoids the pitfalls of cliché. Protagonist L-J connects with his dying mother through abstract art, and poetry, and philosophy in a way that made me consider how rarely I see that kind of mother/son relationship depicted (or even see a mother character given that kind of intellectual life) instead of more common tropes. This is also a very smart novel about the the smoothness of systems, technical and emotional, and how a disruption accrues layers over time — like a piece of amber gathering itself over the years, or a fault in the electric grid upon which L-J makes his living, or like a family memory left unaddressed and unresolved to grow larger and more insurmountable in the future. And the novel's language keeps that idea of disruption, of glitch, in mind all along in the precise abstraction of referring to L-J's parents only as "Mother" and "Father," and the frequent use of quoted technical and medical and financial language when encountered between characters (as in conversations with doctors beside Mother's hospital bed). That style insists we recognize the mechanical or automated (literal and figural) systems we live in while calling attention to the constant disruptions they inevitably produce, and rethink easy assumptions about what is normal function and what is a glitch.
September 8, 2022
This book throughout did a very good job of keeping the reader wanting to know more. It created a very good sense of curiosity and continuously made me flip the pages because I wanted to find out what is going to happen next. Unfortunately, the ending of the book was not as climactic as I expected it to be. I feel like it had a good hook and a good plot but everything ended up leading to nothing at all. Everything I had thought to have a deeper meaning was kind of irrelevant. Overall, I think it was an amazing book in what the author wanted to do but just not my type of book
January 28, 2021
…this deeply felt book (surely, essential reading)…
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.
October 23, 2025
I was expecting this story to be fantastical because of the way it started but it was very much rooted in that space just before death, before the wave of grief crests and breaks and that made it an interesting, quick read.
November 17, 2019
Sets itself up as quite a different story to the one that develops, but all the better for it. Less sci-fi, more complicated web of family drama
May 16, 2020
Glitch by Lee Rourke is a wonderful book. A book that deconstructs the complex and makes it simple and in doing so brings joy and heartbreak, warmth and endearment.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews