Perfidious Albion - Hardcover

Byers, Sam

3.58

1,172 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571336299 ISBN 13: 9780571336296

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2018

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'Crackling with zeitgeisty energy... Sam Byers's dizzying second novel comes over like an episode of Black Mirror as scripted by a "woke" Martin Amis.'

Welcome to Edmundsbury, a small town in England, some time in the recent future. Brexit has happened and is real. Fear and loathing are on the rise. Grass-roots right-wing political party England Always are fomenting hatred. The residents of a failing housing estate are being cleared from their homes. A multinational tech company is making inroads into the infrastructure. Just as the climate seems at its most pressured, masked men begin a series of 'disruptions', threatening to make internet histories public, asking the townspeople what don't you want to share? As tensions mount, lives begin to unravel.

Jess Ellis's research into internet misogyny pushes her relationship with her over-exposed opinion columnist boyfriend Robert Townsend to breaking point. Robert's championing of the inhabitants of the threatened estate begins to erode the edges of his fragile idealism. Local England Always politician Hugo Bennington finds his twisted loyalties catching up with him. At the nearby tech park, behind the utopian rhetoric, Trina James finds that something is dangerously amiss.

A controversial tweet; a series of ill-judged thinkpieces; a riot of opinions. Suddenly Edmundsbury is no longer the peaceful town it has always imagined itself to be. Things are changing. No-one is quite who they appear. The future has arrived, and it is not what anyone imagined.

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Review:

Crackling with zeitgeisty energy... Sam Byers's dizzying second novel comes over like an episode of Black Mirror as scripted by a "woke" Martin Amis. (Guardian)

The is the Black Mirror school of storytelling: take what we know and give it a twist, so the familiar becomes frightening . . . Byers' observations are sharp and mordantly funny . . . Byers has a sharp sense of the way the wind is blowing: it's a cold breeze indeed, and he directs it right down the reader's neck. (Erica Wagner New Statesman)

Perfidious Albion would seem to be the Martin Amis' Money of our time. (David Baddiel)

Brilliantly ironic, hilarious and profound. (Joanna Kavenna)

'Cold-eyed post-Brexit satire.' (Jonathan Coe)

'A new media satire that switches into a hi-tech dystopia centred on class politics, Sam Byers's dizzying second novel comes over like an episode of Black Mirror as scripted by a "woke" Martin Amis. . . What starts as a multi-level skit soon sharpens into a drama of how principles wilt when opportunity knocks. . . Crackling with zeitgeisty energy. . . Byers makes twisty entertainment out of a timely wake-up call about shiny new technologies and the age-old interests they serve.' (Observer)

'What's notable about Byers is his Amis-esque grasp of the absurd, his mastering of contemporary street dialogue, and his ability to tell a compelling, thoroughly modern story.' (Big Issue)

'A novel which imagines life after Brexit in a small English town, where grassroots right-wing political party England Always is on the rise, and masked men are threatening to make internet histories public.' (i)

Furiously smart near-future satire . . . Byers ramps up the stakes with expert control . . . madly funny. (Guardian)

'A smart, funny read that perfectly captures our emerging anxieties.' (Sunday Times)

Book Description:

A searing, satirical portrait of a divided England in a connected age - a 1984 for our times.

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