Reflection, The - Hardcover

Hugo Wilcken

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0992876567 ISBN 13: 9780992876562

Publisher: Melville House UK, 2015

Synopsis

A MAJOR NEW NOVEL FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE CRITICALLY-ACCLAIMED THE EXECUTION

1950s New York: Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley meets Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window.

Disturbed by a troubling phone call, Dr Manne isn't himself when he's called out by the police to evaluate a man suspected of psychosis. But the man is perfectly calm, and insists he's not who the police says he is. Manne isn't sure what to believe, but something definitely isn't right. Before he knows it, he's helping his patient escape from an unfamiliar psychiatric hospital that reminds him of a story he heard during the war, about a secret government medical testing programme...

With the stranger asleep in his bed, and the distinct feeling that he's being followed, Manne is determined to make sense of the events unfolding around him; that is until a careless slip on the subway leads to a horrific accident.

Waking up in a hospital bed, Manne realises his own identity is not as certain as he'd always believed. What kind of a hospital is he in, why can't he leave, and who is the pretty young woman on the balcony, who he watches from his window? As Manne pieces together the story, he realises that pretending to be someone else might be his only chance for escape.

Written in relentlessly probing prose, The Reflection is a stunning psychological thriller full of mesmerizing echoes, unnerving recurrences and frightening reflections. It is the new must-read for fans of Patricia Highsmith and Raymond Chandler, and contemporary novels like Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.

About this title

Review:

Featured on Buzzfeed's 'Brilliant New Books You Should Read This Autumn

''Hitchcock meets Dostoevsky ... The Talented Mr Ripley with psychiatrists ... A strange and clever book. It will leave you looking over your shoulder long after you've put it down.' - The Times

'Hugo Wilcken's novel The Reflection has done my head in. Woozy maze-like story of blurred identities. MC Escher would have been a fan. - Ian Rankin

''Hitchcock meets Camus'' is the unusually apt shoutline for this atmospheric exercise in retro literary noir, and Patricia Highsmith, Vladimir Nabokov, Miles Davis's cool jazz and Mad Men's Don Draper could be added to the list of influences or echoes... seductively ambiguous.' - The Sunday Times

'An experimental novel disguised as a thriller... It is a roller coaster, a helter skelter, a whole literary fairground... F Scott Fitzgerald said that the test of a first-rate intelligence was the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind and still be able to function. We might say the same for first-rate novels.' - John Self, The Guardian

The Reflection has all the hallmarks of a classic noir novel: a narrator in crisis, a psychological drama, a femme fatale (or two)... cleverly done with some panache.' - Shiny New Books

'The Reflection is a remarkable novel that blends elements of Alfred Hitchcock's paranoiac identity crises with David Lynch's oblique gaze. Unsettlingly powerful and beautifully written, this book will echo within you long after you finish reading it.' - James Smythe, author of The Explorer

Praise for Hugo Wilcken and The Execution:

'An impressive and sure-footed debut... Wilcken's tight, energetic prose keeps the pages turning.' The Daily Mail

'Through tone and elegant patterning, The Execution transcends the genre. Its direct, factual narration never makes a misstep.' Anna Shapiro, The Observer

'Unnervingly cool prose... an entertainingly urbane thriller [whose] suspense lies not in the whodunit, but in watching a perfect life unravel.' The Daily Telegraph

'The Execution purports to be an existential novel ... yet the label undermines Wilcken's acuity: namely, his ability to probe the connections between obsession and detachment, violence and retribution... Provocative and engaging.' - The Times Literary Supplement

'You are thrown headlong into a compulsive world of moral ambiguity right at the outset of The Execution... Wilcken refuses to judge Matthew for his behaviour, and this distance gives the novel a beguiling and thought-provoking ambivalence.' Literary Review

'Taut, menacing, full of sinister beguilements. And unsettlingly shrewd.' - Will Eaves, author of This is Paradise and The Absent Therapist

'The Reflection is both a stylish thriller and a novel of ideas, set in New York in the 1940s... a story of grief and the city, set in an era when, beneath the triumphalism, the world was in mourning.' - The TLS

'A classic thriller about mistaken identity... think The Talented Mr Ripley with psychiatrists.' --The Times

About the Author:

HUGO WILCKEN is the author of the novel "The Execution," and the nonfiction book "David Bowie's Low," part of the 33 1/3 series. Both books were critically acclaimed in both the US and the UK. After residing for many years in Paris, he now divides his time between London and Sydney.

About this edition

• Publisher: Melville House UK
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0992876567
• ISBN 13: 9780992876562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 300