Soft! (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) - Softcover

Thomson, Rupert

3.44

632 ratings by Goodreads

9780375702204: Soft! (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375702202 ISBN 13: 9780375702204

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Former bouncer Barker Dodds wants nothing more than to flee his violent past in his native Plymouth for an uncertain new existence as a barber in London's colorful East End. Waif-like Glade Spencer drifts through life as a waitress at a fashionable Soho restaurant, a devoted daughter to her estranged, caravan-dwelling father, and a long-distance girlfriend to an unpredictable American lawyer. And ambitious soft drink branch manager Jimmy Lyle is eager to please his new American boss with a revolutionary marketing strategy for Soft!, one that promises to make the new orange-colored beverage a soda sensation for the twenty-first century.

It is under that effervescent orange glow that these three disparate souls intersect, as each learns "there is nothing soft about the soft drink industry." When unsuspecting "Soft! ambassador" Glade begins to unravel from her subconscious obsession with a product she's never tried, Jimmy's top-secret campaign threatens to spill into the daily papers, and Barker once again finds himself employed as a thug-for-hire. At turns harrowing and darkly humorous, Soft! is a magnificently surreal story, one that New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani calls "Rupert Thomson's most powerful novel yet."

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

At first glance, the thrillers of Rupert Thomson seem to have nothing in common except the expansiveness of his imagination and the lucid radiance of his writing. Air & Fire is about a group of French people sent to California at the end of the 19th century to build a church. The Insult is about a man blinded by a robber in a supermarket parking lot who discovers one night that--because of a bizarre experiment--he can see again. Thomson's latest finds three very different characters--an aimless waitress, a reluctant hit man, and an ambitious young marketing executive--linked by the sudden success of a new soft drink. But a closer look confirms the feeling that Soft continues the author's fascination with the way science can bend and shape the destinies of all sorts of nonscientific people. Certainly Glade Spencer, the flaky young woman who flies off periodically for unpleasant encounters with her American lawyer boyfriend, has no idea when she signs up for a sleep clinic to earn some extra cash that the soda slogans planted in her brain could cause her death. Barker Dodds, the nightclub bouncer from Plymouth, doesn't know why he's being paid to kill Glade. And James Lyle, the striving marketer who thought up the brainwashing scheme in the first place, is deliberately out of the loop about its consequences. All three are so perfectly drawn that you'd recognize them on the street, and the way Thomson describes their quirky, weirdly decorated flats and lifestyles captures the flickering pulse of London with uncanny accuracy. --Dick Adler

Review:

"A tight, hypnotic story. Imagine Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard teaming up. Imagine Quentin Tarantino and Martin Amis collaborating."- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"A stone-cold blast, the kind of twisted thriller that will keep you turning the pages until four in the morning."- Details

"An intense and compulsive thriller. Thomson is a linguistic acrobat... a master of mood and character."-The Times, London

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.