Lurid & Cute

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 *Lurid & Cute is a simple story of mayhem and ennui, almost a caper, but told with such satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity that everything is technicolor again. So alive, so inventive, so very good. – Joshua Ferris, author of ‘To Rise Again at a Decent Hour’It’s a seductive slice of suburban noir – Sebastian Shakespeare * Tatler *Lurid & Cute is strong enough to make admirers out of detractors – Malcolm Forbes * National *Lurid & Cute, which begins as…an exercise in pure style, also reveals itself as a very earnest critique of the morals of a pampered generation – Adam Kirsch * Atlantic *A phantasmagoric tale of a modern world full of sex and violence, which is both funny and shocking. – A. S. Byatt * Spectator *

Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

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