The Fall Guy – A Novel - Softcover

Lasdun, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393354946 ISBN 13: 9780393354942

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017

Synopsis

It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun's acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun's most entertaining novel yet.

About this title

Review:

[A] terrific novel of suspense. . . Lasdun presents the inexorable turnings of fate in a subtle and disconcerting way.

Lasdun's controlled, devious storytelling style infuses every tick of the clock with tension.

Elegant and disturbing... This simple-seeming novel, so graceful in its unfolding, proves dense with psychological detail and sly social observations.

A twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller. . .Lasdun's prose is both lapidary and hypnotic.

Exquisitely written yet propulsively entertaining all at the same time. . . a journey into the psyche of a stalker by someone who has been stalked.

Expertly playing the noir card, Lasdun dissects the mercurial relationships among a wealthy financier, his photographer wife and an aimless cousin during a long hot summer in upstate New York. There are plenty of lies and betrayals in this stylish thriller, but it's the slow burn of obsession that makes it sing.

As the pages turn, the nervous tension ticks ever higher in Lasdun's combustible psychological thriller.

What a sinister and searching novel this is--and what a delight. James Lasdun is one of our great writers.--Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland

James Lasdun has written an elegantly suspenseful novel set in a brilliantly realized affluent upstate New York community not unlike Woodstock--his characters are achingly real, and the self-deceptions that drive them so insightfully depicted, we might almost mistake them for our own. Truly a 'page-turner'--propelled toward just the right ending.--Joyce Carol Oates

"With its deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment, The Fall Guy is more accessible than Lasdun's previous novels. . . . [W]atching Matthew, Charlie and Chloe lure one another into a trap not quite of their own making has a certain shivery fascination . . . you think of Highsmith or Hitchcock."

About the Author:

James Lasdun is the author of The Horned Man and Seven Lies, as well as six collections of poetry. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University and The New School and lives in upstate New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0393354946
• ISBN 13: 9780393354942
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256