Seven Lies

A riveting, thrillerish plot. Here is a stylist who's also a fabulous storyteller... A treat * Daily Telegraph * An elegant, moving and intelligent book * Irish Times * Gripping and beautifully written * Scotsman * Grips the reader from the start... Lean, artful, assured * Spectator * James Lasdun is a tremendous writer and Seven Lies is that rare thing, a novel that delivers on every level. It is so gripping that you want to gobble it down at a single sitting, and yet the prose is so exacting that you want to linger over every sentence -- Geoff Dyer The descriptive brilliance leaves a lasting impression -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Financial Times * Lasdun's second novel has much of the thriller about it. But its more sinuous power comes from other duplicities in Stefan's previous life: a glorious section of the book involves his teenage self plagiarising Walt Whitman to impress his mother's salon, all the while bribing a pederast janitor with aquavit to gain access to the source material -- Alex Clark * Observer * The imaginativeness with which he explores the politics of expectation and failure runs deep...Seven Lies combines the knuckle-whitening tension of a thriller with literary wit and the precision of a surgeon seeking to tease out rotten flesh. Definitely a novel to be admired * Economist * Seven Lies...has a way of enlarging the spirit and refreshing the mind far more comprehensively than many books with twice its 200 pages -- James Buchan * Guardian * [T]his seems to be an artful evocation of the effect of totalitarianism on the individual. But if this sounds drably psychological, I am doing the novel a disservice: it is short, intense, powerful and superbly crafted -- Chris Power * The Times *