This Is Memorial Device - Tapa blanda

The best NEW BOOK I read all year was THIS IS MEMORIAL DEVICE by DAVID KEENAN, which seemed to find a new way of telling a story, a kind of fabricated docu-fiction, and gave utterly vivid three-dimensional life to a community of outsider artists in a small Scottish town at the start of the '80s. It also made me think about memory, reality and how thoughts and ideas work. I felt imaginatively alive while reading it and oddly bereft when it ended. (Stewart Lee)

I wanted to live in this book as it raced along. (Kim Gordon)

One of the most acute, affecting and aphoristic novels of recent years . . . Hallucinatory and haunting. (Guardian)

To say I enjoyed it would be a massive understatement; it's an incredible book, savage and tender and poignant and mad. (Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies)

Captures the terrific, obsessive, ludicrous pomposity of every music fan's youth in an utterly definitive way. (Irvine Welsh)

Full of music and mystery and myth . . . dark, dreamy and delirious. (Herald)

I couldn't really like anybody who doesn't love this book. It's the sound of young Scotland distilled forever. (Andrew O'Hagan)

A magnificent debut novel. (Wire)

I don't often recommend a novel after reading only a hundred pages, but I will make an exception for This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan. . . . It captures the utter seriousness, the all-consuming belief, the sacrifice to art, the veneration of ideas that was as true for a shonky band in Airdrie in 1984 as it was for David Bowie in 1967, or Man Ray in 1915, or Gustav Mahler in 1884. (Kenny Farquharson The Times)

Entirely exhilarating, constantly threatening to spin free of its axis and yet always hauled back by its author's command of his tune. (i Independent)

David Keenan grew up in Airdrie in the late '70s and early 1980s. This Is Memorial Device is his debut novel. He is the author of England's Hidden Reverse.