Sugar Street

(Paperback)

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'An original and fascinating concept that'll keep you hooked and turning the pages' - The Sunday Post

In Jonathan Dee's explosive novel, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road with a large sum of cash stashed under his car seat. Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he meets a city where his past is unlikely to track him down. Renting a room from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions, he seems to have escaped his former self. But can he

In a story that moves with swift dark humour and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator's attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence. Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self - simplicity, kindness, and above all invisibility - grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbours in their politically divided working-class city.

Sugar Street is a risky, engrossing and visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.

Reviews

I don't know when I've been as jolted and delighted by the ending of a novel as I recently was by the ending of Sugar Street, a deft punch of a novel by Jonathan Dee, that had the phrase "an American Dostoyevsky" running around in my head. Dee creates a true page-turner out of simple materials and the result is a troubling and stimulating look at real American life - at the fix that materialism plus the information state has got us into. It's also very funny -- George Sanders
Dee's subtle skill lies in how seductive he makes all this strenuous rationalising on the narrator's part . . . Sugar Street's symbolism does just as much to keep you on edge, bringing us queasily close to a self-cancelling antihero who is simultaneously sent up and - you suspect - just a little bit admired * Observer *
Part of the power of Sugar Street lies in its style . . . in the prose you can feel the adrenaline of [the protagonist's] initial flight wearing off , his life shrinking down to a couple of city blocks . It's brilliantly done * Guardian *
This one will keep you guessing . . . An original and fascinating concept that'll keep you hooked and turning the pages * The Sunday Post *

Author Bio

Jonathan Dee is the author of seven novels, including The Locals, A Thousand Pardons, and The Privileges, which was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the graduate writing program at Syracuse University.