The story of a man at odds with the world. It is a savagely funny novel that disdains literary and moral conventions. “I wanted the reader to come away from this novel feeling that they had witnessed an ‘uncommitted crime’. It’s a story of redemption, but only from the point of view of the narrator. It’s about a man who is, and has always been, at an oblique angle to the world, a man capable of intense feeling, tenderness, eloquence, and casual brutality and preternatural rage.
*
This is the best debut I have read in at least a decade. Anyone who has wished for an English Bernhard need look no look no further.
Stephen Mitchelmore
*
A beautiful war machine. Bowles’s novel discovers a language, a mode of narration, to shelter the legitimate madness, the loneliness and rapture of a very singular individual.
