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‘Write without hope and without despair’: The inspirational notes writers keep on their desks

Lurid & Cute

An extravaganza of suburban noir – complete with one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes – from Adam Thirlwell, twice selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

A dazzlingly imaginative comic noir

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

An extravagantly talented novelist

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

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

Lurid &amp; 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

Lurid &amp; Cute is strong enough to make admirers out of detractors

Lurid &amp; Cute, which begins as…an exercise in pure style, also reveals itself as a very earnest critique of the morals of a pampered generation

A phantasmagoric tale of a modern world full of sex and violence, which is both funny and shocking.

Thirlwell’s narrative is packed with bold similes and outlandish events.

Beautifully told in an engaging way by a stylist at the very top of his game.

Lurid and Cute is a breathless stream of conscientiousness of an unnamed hero whose aimless life is ultimately set to self-destruction. There is an element of Tarantino in the sex, violence and freneticism of the book.

'I had this vision very clearly of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, – the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute.’ 
 
In this way the hero of Adam Thirlwell’s new novel describes the book you hold between your hands: a delirious tale of backchat and low tricks, all of which begin when our hero wakes beside a woman who is bleeding, unconscious and not, unfortunately, his wife... And then, of course, events get very much worse. 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2015 
 
WINNER OF THE E.M. FORSTER AWARD 2015

Politics

Adam Thirlwell's sharp, funny, entirely original and explosive debut.

Extremely accomplished...very sophisticated

One of the funniest, most stylish and utterly original debuts in years

This is a clever book. Fantastically clever...funny and strangely insightful... A genuinely original book

Allusive, barbed, cocky, flamboyant, reckless, obscene and very funny

Adam Thirlwell is a craftsman - a master builder... Hugely entertaining... I have read this book twice. I shall read it again

Politics deserves your immediate attention

This book is a literary sensation... Politics really is the novel of the twenty-first century

A book you immediately want to give to all of your friends...irresisitibly funny and true

'In case you had not noticed,' writes Adam Thirlwell in his first novel, Politics, 'in this book I am not interested in anything so small as the history of the USSR. I am not writing anything so limited.' 
 
In this epic miniature, therefore, Politics tells the story of three kids in their twenties falling in love with each in London. And, simultaneously, it tells other, smaller stories: of Stalin on the phone, Mao in the bathroom, Osip Mandelstam in another bathroom, Adolf Hitler on all fours, and Milan Kundera in an argument. 
 
Politics is not (quite) about politics.

The Escape

Remarkable second novel by the author of the highly-praised and controversial Politics.

A witty, irreverant and elegaic new novel...Haffner is a Quixote of our time

A novel where the humour is melancholic, the melancholy mischievous and the talent startling

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

Beautifully written, poignant and clever... Thirlwell has a genuinely unique insight into humankind

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

A wittily observant young author... Audacious

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

The narrative develops a sense of authenticity that is persuasive enough not to be disturbed, even by the inevitable adventurous sex scene

The Escape is an utterly glorious piece of work...Thirlwell has with this superb book also staked a rightful claim as a literary phenomenon

Thirwell's novel elegantly portrays the ageing Haffner's thrilling attempts to escape from lovers, the mafia, his family and himself

The writing is polished and full of allusions

'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.

Miss Herbert

'Thoughtful and frequently hilarious... It is also a work of art, a new form' - A.S. Byatt, Financial Times

This year's most richly pleasurable reading experience

A scintillating figure-of-eight skate around, inter alia, Sterne, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Gombrowicz and Nabokov, on the theme of style and translation, a one-off like a novel with everything cut except the digressions, and an interesting fact on every page

His book shoves its delirious way around and through four centuries of great novelists, tumbles them down one trapdoor and hauls them out of another; it provokes as much as evokes and, in general, sets up a dance whose music he partly finds in them and partly invents for them...a prodigy and, as such, unstoppable...a treasure

A deft and thought-provoking piece of work

There is a beguiling and completely uncategorisable quality about Miss Herbert…its elegance, wit and companionable charm will elude only those of the narrowest disposition… Miss Herbert is the book from this year I would most like to buy as a gift for the people I like

The most exciting piece of literary criticism to be published here in some time... An intellectual thrill-ride packed with rhetorical fireworks

Truly raises questions that are vital to novelists and their readers; it will be hard for anyone with an interest in the subject to keep from defiling the margins with notes. Mr. Thirlwell quotes Laurence Sterne: "A true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call'd forth by what he reads...'tis like reading himself, and not the book." That effect is palpable here

There is a beguiling and completely uncategorisable quality ... it's elegance, wit and companionable charm will elude only those of the narrowest disposition... the book from this year I would most like to buy as a gift for the people I like

Eclectic and full of entertaining anecdotes...It is beautifully produced, replete with photographs and other literary distractions...Thirlwell's literary criticism is often sharp...He has interesting things to say about style

The secret history of novelists is often a history of exile and tourism - a history of language learning. Like the story of Gustave Flaubert and Juliet Herbert, it is a history of loss and mistakes. As Flaubert finished Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert, his niece's governess, translated the novel into English. But this translation has since been lost. 
 
Miss Herbert provides a map to the imaginary country shared between writers and readers. For translation, and emigration, is the way into a new history of the novel. We assume that we can read novels in translation. We also assume that style does not translate. But the history of the novel is the history of style. Miss Herbert explores the solutions to this conundrum. 
 
This book demonstrates a new way of reading internationally - complete with maps, illustrations, and helpful diagrams. And it includes a slim appendix: 'Mademoiselle O', a story by Vladimir Nabokov, which he worked on in three languages, over thirty years, and whose original French version is now translated into English by Adam Thirlwell. 
 
 Adam Thirlwell was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013.

Adam Thirlwell

‘Unlike anything else’ Salman Rushdie

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE* 
 
It's the eighteenth-century and Celine is in trouble 
 
'A terrific novel' 
FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
'A radically beautiful new novel' 
SHEILA HETI, author of Pure Colour 
 
Paris, 1775: Celine's husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. Meanwhile men are inventing stories about her - about her affairs, her sexuality, and addictions... 
 
All these stories are lies, but the public loves them - spreading them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in this society ruled by men high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, and crimes against women. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth and beauty. 
 
Fantastical, funny and blindingly bright, The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.

Adam Thirlwell

The Future Future

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