Lurid & Cute
By (Author) Adam Thirlwell
Vintage Publishing
Vintage
15th February 2016
28th January 2016
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.92
Short-listed for The Goldsmiths Prize 2015 (UK)
Paperback
368
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 23mm
266g
An extravaganza of suburban noir - complete with one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes - from Adam Thirlwell, twice selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. 'I had this vision very clearly of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound- with all the tones that no one ever admires, - the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute.' In this way the hero of Adam Thirlwell's new novel describes the book you hold between your hands- a delirious tale of backchat and low tricks, all of which begin when our hero wakes beside a woman who is bleeding, unconscious and not, unfortunately, his wife... And then, of course, events get very much worse. SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2015 WINNER OF THE E.M. FORSTER AWARD 2015
A dazzlingly imaginative comic noir * Financial Times *
The narrator of Thirlwells latest book may be his best creation yet The way time works here pulled and stretched, sped up and sped down testifies to Thirlwells mastery as a storyteller Impossible to put down * New York Times Book Review *
An extravagantly talented novelist * Evening Standard *
Reading Thirlwell is like going into the happiest, cholesterol-clogged form of literary existence. Whether hes writing about the decline and fall of our civilization or a guy who thinks hes accidentally killed his lover, the prose bounces us into a state of fulfilled happiness and wonder -- Gary Shteyngart * Salon *
Reads like a collaboration between Kundera and Murakami to adapt SJ Watsons Before I Go To Sleep or Gillian Flynns Gone Girl into post-modernist fiction * Guardian *
Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into 30 languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an Advisory Editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.