The Angel’s Cut

Description

Title: The Angel’s Cut
Author: Elizabeth Knox
Publisher: Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2009
Format: Paperback
Condition: Very Good

Description:

Boomtown Los Angeles, 1929. The movies have burst into sound and aircraft into the skies at speed. Into a world of soundstages and speakeasies comes Xas — stunt flier and wingless angel, with his French pilot’s licence and his broken heart, determined only to go on living in the air.

The Angel’s Cut picks up the story of Xas a hundred years after The Vintner’s Luck. He has outlived Sobran, the French vintner he loved across fifty years of Burgundy harvests. Now he is in Hollywood, doing what he can do: flying. What grounds him is Conrad Cole — movie director, aircraft designer, a man of tremendous appetite and sovereign darkness — and Flora McLeod, the film editor who sees something in Xas that no one else ever has. And Lucifer, who lost Xas once before, has not forgotten him.

The angel’s cut, in winemaking, is the portion lost to evaporation from the barrel — the share taken by angels. That is the title’s double meaning, and the novel’s: something between the human and the divine, belonging fully to neither.

Knox published this in the same year Niki Caro’s film adaptation of The Vintner’s Luck premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is a sequel, but it is also its own thing: a Hollywood novel, a novel about early aviation, and a novel about what an immortal being does when everyone he has loved is dead.

Why We Stock It:

The sequel to one of NZ’s most internationally celebrated novels, set in 1920s Hollywood at the exact moment when the world the first book knew was dissolving. Out of print. Elizabeth Knox at her dazzling best.