Lurid & Cute - Tapa dura

"A dazzlingly imaginative comic noir" (Financial Times)

"The narrator of Thirlwell’s latest book may be his best creation yet... The way time works here – pulled and stretched, sped up and sped down – testifies to Thirlwell’s mastery as a storyteller... Impossible to put down" (New York Times Book Review)

"An extravagantly talented novelist" (Evening Standard)

"Reading Thirlwell is like going into the happiest, cholesterol-clogged form of literary existence. Whether he’s writing about the decline and fall of our civilization or a guy who thinks he’s accidentally killed his lover, the prose bounces us into a state of fulfilled happiness and wonder" (Gary Shteyngart Salon)

"Reads like a collaboration between Kundera and Murakami to adapt SJ Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep or Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl into post-modernist fiction" (Guardian)

Shortlisted for the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize

This yarn takes place in the suburbs of a giant city. In Brasilia they’re coming off their night shift, in Tokyo they’re having their first whisky sours – that’s what’s happening elsewhere in the world when our hero wakes up. Together with his wife and dog, he lives at home with his parents. He has had the good education and, until recently, the good job. In other words, the juggernaut of meaning was not parked heavily on our hero’s lawn.

But then the lurid overtakes him – and whether this lurid tone is caused by our hero’s new unemployment, or his feelings for a girl who is not his wife, or the return of his old friend Hiro, it’s hard to say. What’s definite is that a chain of events begins that feels to those inside it, narcotic and neurotic, like one long and terrible descent – complete with lies, deceit, and chicanery; one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes.

While if you start to notice minute doubles and repeats, or wonder if what you took as some trick of perspective might in fact be a kink of reality, perhaps that shouldn't be so much of a surprise... For very possibly this suburban noir as the story of a woebegone and global generation – and our hero, the sweetest narrator in world literature, may well also be the most fearsome.