On Bended Knees

With this debut novel On Bended Knees, shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award, Martin Goodman started to explore a major theme of his writing: the aftermath of wars. Born in Leicester, the adults of his English childhood all carried their wartime stories, and as a teenager in the ‘70s he moved to West Berlin to look back on that wartime era through German eyes. His nonfiction picked up the theme and his biography of the scientist J.S. Haldane, who worked to counter WW1 gas attacks, Suffer & Survive, won 1st Prize, Basis of Medicine in the BMA Book Awards. In Client Earth, which won the Jury’s Choice Business Book of the Year Award 2018, and the Green Book Award from Santa Monica Libraries, he told the story of ecolawyers who battle to rescue the planet from human destruction. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull. He lives in Los Angeles and London.

"Goodman interweaves a young man's search for selfhood in provincial Britain with the mysteries of his mother's German past." - Vogue, UK"This excellent first novel's central character is so completely realised he could have walked out of one of those enigmatic Bruce Chatwin pieces about old mysterious European types."- Time Out, London"Heralds a new dawn for British writing."- The Daily Post"ON BENDED KNEES is a professional combination of rite-of-passage novel and cultural quest. The troubled half-German adolescent hero, Tomas, goes to stay with relatives in Berlin, following the disturbing death of his father. That city is brilliantly seen through the hero’s eyes, as is the character who effectively steals the novel, the blind and autocratic Herr Poppel. The novel comes most to life when Tomas and Poppel are taking their walks around the divided city’s streets and parks, the older man dispensing the secrets of longevity, the younger man hesitantly challenging him on the implications of his cast-iron pronouncements and their relation to Germany’s guilty past. A very impressive debut."- The Scotsman"ON BENDED KNEES is puzzling at first, because Tomas, who wants to tell his own story with proper attention – ‘on bended knees’ – seems to have very little personality, or even particular preference. But you come to see that he is conserving himself deliberately against the old suffering, the tired old guilt of the adults. He is biding his time. DJ Taylor has called ON BENDED KNEES “deceptively simple”, but I can’t see what’s deceptive about it. Simplicity is a great virtue, in novels as elsewhere. After all, it can only be produced from sincerity."- Penelope Fitzgerald, The Evening Standard"The novel's blunt, no-frills economy is part of its charm. Goodman writes with flare and panache, and the narrative fizzes along. Goodman's novel soars."- The Times