The Kept

How far would you go for your family, for love, for survival, for revenge? 
 
A debut novel of big skies, deep snow, and open wounds.

A classily written crime novel that is also an atmospheric evocation of a bygone era.

Darkly beautiful... The Kept is a rare blend of brutality and empathy, emotion and close observation. I thought at times of Cormac McCarthy's work and of the novels of David Vann. At other times it brought to mind Stef Penney's The Tenderness Of Wolves and Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. But there's something wonderfully distinctive about The Kept... A literary page-turner of the highest calibre by a writer of serious talent.

Mysterious and compelling... James Scott has written a riveting and memorable debut novel.

With its vivid sense of time and place, lyrical writing, and complex questions of what constitutes a family, The Kept is an outstanding debut by a bright new voice in fiction.

Winter and discontent... Scott is the master of mood... Haunting'

Dark and mysterious… A novel whose daring is found in its bleakness… The plot unfolds with a weighty languor reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy… Sparse, elegant… haunting.

Reads with the stark clarity of a Johnny Cash song

Feels like the shell of a Cormac McCarthy novel filled with the intricate yearning and familial strife of a Lorca play… A gripping combination I don’t think we’re likely to find anywhere else.

Dark and brutal… Never lets up until the climactic scene, in prose that’s brooding and intense right up until the final paragraph… So packed with incident and character, and so fluidly paced, that it’s brought vividly to life by Scott’s meticulous control

Scott is [a] master storyteller in this outstanding debut

A thrilling adventure and a literary triumph

A deeply moving, disconcerting novel… Scott manages something quite difficult here, balancing both terror and tenderness with apparent ease. By the end of The Kept, you’ll be convinced that he can do just about anything.

Atmospheric and memorable, suffused with dread and suspense right up to the last page.

Artisan-like control... As breathless as it is inevitable

James Scott has published short fiction in American literary reviews and journals, including Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction and Post Road, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. He writes for the music magazine Under the Radar, is an issue editor at One Story, and teaches at Grub Street in Boston. The Kept is his first novel and has been longlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. He lives in western Massachusetts, America.

HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO FOR YOUR FAMILY, FOR LOVE, FOR REVENGE? 
 
'Dark and mysterious ... reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy ... Sparse, elegant ... haunting.' New York Times 
 
In the winter of 1897, Elspeth Howell returns home to her isolated farmstead to find her family brutally murdered. Only her twelve-year-old son, Caleb, survives. 
 
Mother and son set out into the frozen wilderness to track down the men responsible for this horrific crime. Their search takes them to the ice-locked shores of Lake Erie, and a merciless town where violence abounds. As Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood, he begins to uncover truths about his family he could never have anticipated, while Elspeth must confront secrets she has long kept hidden. Together, they discover the bond between mother and son may be their only hope for redemption.

Nick Polson

James Scott

There comes a time in the life of a subject when someone steps up and writes the book about it. AIQ explores the fascinating history of the ideas that drive this technology of the future and demystifies the core concepts behind it; the result is a positive and entertaining look at the great potential unlocked by marrying human creativity with powerful machines.

Steven Levitt, bestselling co-author of Freakonomics

Entertaining and persuasive. The book’s goal is to explain how artificial intelligence delivers its incredible results, and Polson and Scott are like a pair of excitable mechanics lifting up the bonnet of a sports car. This is a passionate book, and it is a model of how to make data science accessible and exciting.

Grounding AI in tried-and-true methods makes it seem less alien: Computers are simply faster ways to solve familiar problems. Hence the book’s title, a portmanteau of AI and IQ—the point being that we need both.

In an entertaining primer, two academic data scientists put the case for the defence on artificial intelligence, and show how we can harness its power for a better world.

At last, a book on the ideas behind AI and data science by people who really understand data. Cutting through the usual journalistic puff and myths, they clearly explain the underlying ideas behind the way that troughloads of data are being harnessed to build the algorithms that can carry out such extraordinary feats. But they are also clear about the limitations and potential risks of these algorithms, and the need for society to scrutinise and even regulate their use. A real page-turner, with fine stories and just enough detail: I learned a lot.

David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, University of Cambridge

Nick Polson and James Scott take us under the hood of AI and data science, showing that behind most algorithms is the story of a person trying to solve a problem and make the world better. The result is an engaging, optimistic vision of an age in which computers have become a pervasive, influential presence in every aspect of life.

Michael J. Casey, senior advisor at MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative, and co-author of The Truth Machine

Admirably clear and totally readable

This book will help you sleep at night... The authors spin some winning tales. Who'd turn down being treated with a smart surgical knife?

Entertaining and persuasive. The book’s goal is to explain how artificial intelligence delivers its incredible results, and Polson and Scott are like a pair of excitable mechanics lifting up the bonnet of a sports car. This is a passionate book, and it is a model of how to make data science accessible and exciting.

How artificial intelligence works and how we can harness its power for a better world

____________________ 
 
What is AIQ? How does it work? Most importantly, how can it help us? 
 
Two leading data scientists offer an up-close and user-friendly look at artificial intelligence and how to harness its power for a better world. 
 
'A positive and entertaining look at the great potential unlocked by marrying human creativity with powerful machines.' Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics 
____________________ 
 
Dozens of times per day, we all interact with intelligent machines that are constantly learning from the wealth of data now available to them. These machines, from smart phones to talking robots to self-driving cars, are remaking the world in the twenty first century in the same way that the Industrial Revolution remade the world in the nineteenth. 
 
AIQ is based on a simple premise: if you want to understand the modern world, then you have to know a little bit of the mathematical language spoken by intelligent machines. AIQ will teach you that language but in an unconventional way, anchored in stories rather than equations.

James Scott

Praise for AIQ

There comes a time in the life of a subject when someone steps up and writes the book about it. AIQ explores the fascinating history of the ideas that drive this technology of the future and demysti ...

Entertaining and persuasive. The book’s goal is to explain how artificial intelligence delivers its incredible results, and Polson and Scott are like a pair of excitable mechanics lifting up the bonnet of a sport ...

Grounding AI in tried-and-true methods makes it seem less alien: Computers are simply faster ways to solve familiar problems. Hence the book’s title, a portmanteau of AI and IQ—the point being that we need both.< ...

There comes a time in the life of a subject when someone steps up and writes the book about it. AIQ explores the fascinating history of the ideas that drive this technology of the future and demysti ...

Entertaining and persuasive. The book’s goal is to explain how artificial intelligence delivers its incredible results, and Polson and Scott are like a pair of excitable mechanics lifting up the bonnet of a sport ...

Grounding AI in tried-and-true methods makes it seem less alien: Computers are simply faster ways to solve familiar problems. Hence the book’s title, a portmanteau of AI and IQ—the point being that we need both.< ...

There comes a time in the life of a subject when someone steps up and writes the book about it. AIQ explores the fascinating history of the ideas that drive this technology of the future and demysti ...

Entertaining and persuasive. The book’s goal is to explain how artificial intelligence delivers its incredible results, and Polson and Scott are like a pair of excitable mechanics lifting up the bonnet of a sport ...

Grounding AI in tried-and-true methods makes it seem less alien: Computers are simply faster ways to solve familiar problems. Hence the book’s title, a portmanteau of AI and IQ—the point being that we need both.< ...

Books by James Scott

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