Author(s): Sharon Kivland

Novel | Essay

 "I wrote five days a week for a year, no more than a page, writing only for the length of the analytic hour, fifty minutes, following Freud's model of train travel for his theory of free association, acting 'as though, for instance, [you were] a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views [...] outside'. Many of my women character's names begin with A: their first names; there are few surnames, save those of the secondary male characters. . Some of these women exist or existed, others are from fiction, or write fiction. Some are friends or acquaintances. None are credited but a keen reader could recognise many of them. I invented nothing. I am the aleph."

'Sharon Kivland is a phenomenal writer, thinker and artist.' Ali Smith

'Each day of this unprecedented novel is its own density, its own lightness. The days are spaces: close interiors; possible gardens; open fields. They are page-spaces; conversation-spaces; spoken aloud spaces... I read Sharon Kivland for this: for the life-supporting habitat of her writing, a place to live and grow.' Kate Briggs

'Only Kivland's deft hand could unpick this elaborate familial fabric of fathers and daughters and mothers with such exactitude and diligence. Every nimbly unravelled section of this yarn shimmers with her wicked brilliance.' Katrina Palmer

'Not only skilled fancy work but profoundly moving, Kivland unpicks the stories of the women whose repeated patterns are entangled, interwoven. If you follow her thread, you will reach the heart of a labyrinth.' Joanna Walsh

'Sharon Kivland's ABECEDAIRE is a dark, shimmering archive of the remainder. The book's figures, its Annes, Annies, and Annas, come into view as tableaux vivants from which they look out, beyond us, eluding us, eluding definition. They disappear into Kivland's beautiful and mysterious network of passages.' Sarah Bernstein

'How to describe ABECEDAIRE? A garden of fathers, a labyrinth of sisters, a ballet of daughters, a primer of desire, a treasure trove, a tapestry, a reader's dream.' Isabel Wohl

'Steeped in Freudian mythology, and attuned to a distaff side of edgy writers such as Anna Kavan and Ann Quin, ABECEDAIRE's author Sharon Kivland, emerges as if a nymph reborn from a Viennese fountain, her beautifully written daily quota of words configured as a learned novel of two-hundred-and-fifty-seven scenes, sometimes floral, sometimes hard core in their eroticism.' Michael Hampton

Author Biography: Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer (she has been called a poet, much to her surprise). She is also an editor and publisher, the latter under the imprint MA BIBLIOTHEQUE. Her books and pamphlets include the series Freud on Holiday; Unable to achieve broad recognition in my lifetime, I laboured in obscurity until my death last year; and A Lover's Discourse / Un discours amoureux, which was shortlisted for the Bob Calle Prix de livre d'artiste in 2017. She lives in London and rural France.