The Fall Guy: Lasdun James - Hardcover

Lasdun, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1910702838 ISBN 13: 9781910702833

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2017

Synopsis

A Guardian Book of the Year

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 mountain-top 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. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy?

A story of fracture in paradise, where ancient resentments and current desires lurch violently to the surface and an idyllic summer retreat becomes a stage for lies, lust and revenge, The Fall Guy is Lasdun’s most entertaining novel yet: a taut psychological thriller that is superbly written, darkly vivid, with an unforgettably febrile atmosphere of erotic danger.

About this title

Review:

"Engaging, effortlessly readable... Lasdun’s writing style is clean and straightforward. All the complexity resides in character and detail. This is masterfully controlled 2am noir." (Lionel Shriver Financial Times)

"With its deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment, The Fall Guy is more accessible than Lasdun’s previous novels... watching 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." (M. Harrison Guardian)

"Nothing is straightforward in this slick, Highsmithian thriller, and while the damaged Matthew’s capacity for self-deception is flagged early, Lasdun’s skill lies not least in letting us think that we might therefore have his number. Wrong – and yet the novel’s denouement feels fated even as it smoothly steals the breath. " (Stephanie Cross Observer)

"Impossible to put down." (Daily Mail)

"Exceptionally entertaining...The Fall Guy reads like early Ian McEwan or late Patricia Highsmith... Lasdun is masterly in his story’s construction... This is exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling." (New York Times Book Review)

"Already drawing comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train ― but more aptly described as the literary descendant of Dostoyevsky and Patricia Highsmith in an alluring contemporary setting ― The Fall Guy is a twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller." (Boston Globe)

"James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing...when we read him we know what language is for ... In sentence after sentence, the reader feels Lasdun’s words shaping and then freely donating a world to us, with great flexible artistry." (James Wood)

"The early pages crackle with a gut-level sense of menace... [There is] a brilliantly unbearable pivotal scene... The artistry in this morally complex, coolly seductive portrait of an imploding psyche means that there is plenty to admire on a repeat visit." (Anthony Cummins Literary Review, 2017 Books of the Year)

"James Lasdun has written an elegantly suspenseful novel set in a brilliantly realised 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)

"What a sinister and searching novel this is – and what a delight. James Lasdun is one of our great writers." (Joseph O’Neill)

Book Description:

A Guardian Book of the Year

'Engaging, effortlessly readable... Lasdun’s writing style is clean and straightforward. All the complexity resides in character and detail. This is masterfully controlled 2am noir.' - Lionel Shriver Financial Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1910702838
• ISBN 13: 9781910702833
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272