Escape: A Novel - Tapa blanda

"A witty, irreverent, and elegiac new novel." --The New York Times Book Review

"A novel where the humor is melancholic, the melancholy mischievous, and the talent startling." --Milan Kundera

"A wittily observant young author . . . Audacious." --Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

"Effortlessly blends reflections on memory with, say, hanky-panky in bathtubs. The result--enough to shock even a dedicated philanderer--is an accessibly cerebral story of one man and his tragic libido." --Scott Indrisek, Time Out (New York)

"In The Escape, you can practically see Bellow's Augie March, Roth's Mickey Sabbath and Martin Amis's John Self applauding, ghost-like, from the margins . . . The novel fizzes with intelligence, verbal skill and humour." --Simon Baker, The Observer (London)

"The Escape is one of the best British novels I've read this year for one reason: Thirlwell's prose. At once effervescent and elegant, his narrative voice lifts the novel's lecherous comedy beyond the sublunary lovers' antics into a more rarefied sphere . . . The novel abounds, from start to finish, with graceful turns of phrase and slanting insights . . . What rescues The Escape is no deus ex machina, no twist in its plot . . . but instead the cadences and harmonies of a very fine composition." --Sarah Churchwell, The Guardian

"Witty and engaging, erudite but fleet and sinuous; the questions he asks are lightly posed, his mock grandeur dispersing in a sea of ridiculous incident and comic undercutting . . . In this playful, eloquent novel, Adam Thirlwell demonstrates that knowing why one acts as one does is rarely the whole answer, or much more than the beginning of a question." --Alex Clark, The Times Literary Supplement

'The more I knew of Haffner,' writes Adam Thirlwell in The Escape, 'the more real he became, this was true. And, simultaneously, Haffner disappeared.'

In a forgotten spa town snug in the Alps, at the end of the twentieth century, Haffner is seeking a cure, more women, and a villa that belonged to his late wife. But really he is trying to escape: from his family, his lovers, his history, his entire Haffnerian condition. For Haffner is 78.

Haffner, in other words, is too old to be grown up.