<b>A dazzlingly imaginative comic noir</b>
Financial Times
The narrator of Thirlwell’s latest book may be his best creation yet… The way time works here – pulled and stretched, sped up and sped down – <b>testifies to Thirlwell’s mastery as a storyteller… Impossible to put down</b>
New York Times Book Review
<b>An extravagantly talented novelist</b>
Evening Standard
Reading Thirlwell is like going into the happiest, cholesterol-clogged form of literary existence. Whether he’s writing about the decline and fall of our civilization or a guy who thinks he’s accidentally killed his lover,<b> the prose bounces us into a state of fulfilled happiness and wonder</b>
- Gary Shteyngart, Salon
Reads like a collaboration between Kundera and Murakami to adapt SJ Watson’s <i>Before I Go To Sleep </i>or Gillian Flynn’s <i>Gone Girl </i>into post-modernist fiction
Guardian
<i>Lurid & Cute</i> is a simple story of mayhem and ennui, almost a caper, but told with such satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity that everything is technicolor again. So alive, so inventive, so very good.
- Joshua Ferris, author of 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour',
It’s a seductive slice of suburban noir
- Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler
<i>Lurid & Cute</i> is strong enough to make admirers out of detractors
- Malcolm Forbes, National
<i>Lurid & Cute</i>, which begins as…an exercise in pure style, also reveals itself as a very earnest critique of the morals of a pampered generation
- Adam Kirsch, Atlantic
A phantasmagoric tale of a modern world full of sex and violence, which is both funny and shocking.
- A. S. Byatt, Spectator
'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