You Don't Have To Live Like This - Tapa blanda

Intense and very funny. (Guardian 'Best Novels of 2015')

Is Benjamin Markovits contemporary fiction's best kept secret? .... [his] seventh novel is as profound a meditation on contemporary America as you're likely to read this year. (Max Liu Independent on Sunday)

It is a remarkable novel ... This is fiction writing that is alive in your hand. (Irish Independent)

Multi-stranded and gripping . . . So engrossing, so satisfyingly complex. (Sunday Times)

Reads like a season of The Wire scripted by J M Coetzee . . . Like the lives it describes, this novel contains multitudes. (Independent on Sunday)

You Don't Have to Live Like This is a very smart book, with vividly drawn characters and densely-woven themes ... at its heart is the vexatious question of race. (Mick Brown Daily Telegraph)

[A] consistently impressive novel: a strikingly current portrait of tinderbox race relations that also raises enduring questions about the good life and the nature of truth ... highly recommended. (Stephanie Cross Daily Mail)

Markovits articulates this irretrievably messy subject with exhilarating clarity and a good deal of bravery ... The prose delivers spare, fast-paced social realism (think Jonathan Franzen on Slimfast) and the plot is multi-stranded and gripping. (Claire Lowdon Sunday Times)

Terrifically readable ... a sweeping story of gentrification, class war and racism in America. (Literary Review)

[A] subtle and finely poised novel. (Stuart Kelly Spectator)

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Ten years out of Yale and drifting through a teaching career, Greg Marnier heads for his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk. There he bumps into an old friend, Robert James, now wealthy and influential from dotcom success. He has a plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit and build a new America from their ruins. For a small investment, Greg can turn himself into a twentieth-century pioneer. But for every urban misfit who's come for a fresh start, there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by these new young colonials. Soon, the realities of life on America's urban frontier become all too apparent . . .