A State of Shock - Softcover

Salaman, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006490301 ISBN 13: 9780006490302

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1998

Synopsis

Very funny, but very sinister story in bestselling style of Salaman’s The Frights.

A female barrister is given the job of defending a male murderer. Drawn into his story, she becomes convinced of his innocence. At the same time, she is plagued by disturbing phone calls. Her boyfriend is studying the decline of institutions, convinced that society can no longer cope with the speed of change in electronic communication.

How do the threads pull together? A weirdly sinister – and at the same time indisputably very funny – experiment will draw the various players into a modern maze of virtual reality and political chicanery.

Salaman combines laugh-out-loud one-liners with a disturbing vision of the world just around the corner in a tour de force entertainment.

About this title

Review:

Praise for the author’s previous novels:

The Frights:

‘Baroque characters, witty sex and stylishly funny’
The Times

‘Deliciously piquant and affectionate observation’
Cosmopolitan

‘Reeking with malice and lust... a genuine talent for constructive alarm’
The Guardian

Dangerous Pursuits
‘is great fun throughout... a brilliantly sustained performance... as preposterous as anything imagined by Tom Sharpe’
The Standard

The Garden of Earthly Delights:

‘Crisply efficient and informative. Better still, the thickening of the atmospheric soup is pacey, enticing, carrying the reader briskly and agreeably along’
Times Literary Supplement

From the Back Cover:

' A STATE OF SHOCK' IS A PROPHETIC NOVEL OF SINISTER VIOLENCE AND UNSETTLING HUMOUR.

Heather Semple is an ambitious barrister in a Britain with plenty of work for lawyers. She could do with more prominent cases and a less sexist head of Chambers, but, at this early stage of her career, Heather can count herself a success.

When a high profile case defending a man accused of a particularly brutal rape and murder is offered to her, Heather leaps at the chance, convinced it's the break she needs. But as Heather becomes increasingly involved with the defendant, the very world about her seems to shake and change as she is unwittingly court up in a social conspiracy of terrifying implications.

From the author of the best-sellers' The Frights' and' Falling Apart' comes a fast paced and acerbic novel that takes a dark and powerfully compelling look at modern developments.

‘A severely chilling novel... describing as it does a brutish Britain with all its alien features of the present subtly magnified into terror. Salaman is one of the new breed who use the conventions of the crime novel to say much more.’
FRANCES FYFIELD, 'The Times'

‘Salaman writes with such charm and wit... an entertaining and well-written glimpse of the near future.’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0006490301
• ISBN 13: 9780006490302
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320