The Shards: Bret Easton Ellis. The Sunday Times Bestselling New Novel from the Author of AMERICAN PSYCHO

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Los Angeles, 1981 17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends, even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equalled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence.

Can he trust his friends or his own mind to make sense of the danger they appear to be in Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, Bret spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17 sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage.

Reviews

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Praise for Bret Easton Ellis:

'A writer of real American genius' - GQ

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'A rebel whose work is controversial precisely because its sinister themes are so dexterously written' - Sunday Telegraph

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'One of the most gifted and serious novelists working in America today' - Financial Times

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'A master stylist with hideously interesting new-fangled manners and the heart of an old-fashioned moralist' - Observer

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'A living embodiment of how, between the pre-digital world of 1985 and today, both everything and nothing has changed. And it's been Ellis's life's work to make us confront the absurdity of that world in all its grimness, comedy and plastic beauty' - New York Times

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Author Bio

Bret Easton Ellis is also the author of American Psycho, Glamorama, The Informers, Less Than Zero, Lunar Park and The Rules of Attraction. His work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. He lives in Los Angeles.