The Fall Guy

An idyllic summer retreat becomes a stage for lies, lust and revenge in this psychological thriller.

Engaging, effortlessly readable… Lasdun’s writing style is clean and straightforward. All the complexity resides in character and detail. This is masterfully controlled 2am noir.

What a sinister and searching novel this is – and what a delight. James Lasdun is one of our great writers.

Exceptionally entertaining…The Fall Guy reads like early Ian McEwan or late Patricia Highsmith… Lasdun is masterly in his story’s construction… This is exactly what a literary thriller should be: intelligent, careful, swift, unsettling.

Nothing is straightforward in this slick, Highsmithian thriller, and while the damaged Matthew’s capacity for self-deception is flagged early, Lasdun’s skill lies not least in letting us think that we might therefore have his number. Wrong – and yet the novel’s denouement feels fated even as it smoothly steals the breath.

A deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment

Already drawing comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train — but more aptly described as the literary descendant of Dostoyevsky and Patricia Highsmith in an alluring contemporary setting — The Fall Guy is a twisty, chilly, exquisitely written, and tautly suspenseful exploration of big ideas in the guise of a psychological thriller.

James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing…when we read him we know what language is for … In sentence after sentence, the reader feels Lasdun’s words shaping and then freely donating a world to us, with great flexible artistry.

The early pages crackle with a gut-level sense of menace… [There is] a brilliantly unbearable pivotal scene… The artistry in this morally complex, coolly seductive portrait of an imploding psyche means that there is plenty to admire on a repeat visit.

James Lasdun has written an elegantly suspenseful novel set in a brilliantly realised affluent upstate New York community not unlike Woodstock – his characters are achingly real, and the self-deceptions that drive them so insightfully depicted, we might almost mistake them for our own. Truly a “page-turner” – propelled toward just the right ending.

In The Fall Guy, James Lasdun brings the signature gifts to contemporary noir that he’s displayed in other literary venues – wit, style, an attractive gravitas. And the tale itself is sharp, acute in its observations, and absorbing. It’s a rich read.

Elegant and disturbing…This simple-seeming novel, so graceful in its unfolding, proves dense with psychological detail and sly social observations.

Lasdun serves up another complex psychological thriller. . . A gripping, often unnerving page-turner perfect for fans of Thomas H. Cook, Ian McEwan, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Lasdun's controlled, devious storytelling style infuses every tick of the clock with tension.

[A] terrific novel… Lasdun presents the inexorable turnings of fate in a subtle and disconcerting way.

This sleek, sexy, expertly constructed thriller oozes with a malign, overheated atmosphere.

Lasdun has produced a fascinating study of how friendship can sometimes become obligation.

Expertly playing the noir card, Lasdun dissects the mercurial relationships among a wealthy financier, his photographer wife and an aimless cousin during a long hot summer in upstate New York. There are plenty of lies and betrayals in this stylish thriller, but it’s the slow burn of obsession that makes it sing.

The Man Booker-nominated author's critically praised new novel is a Trump Age thriller: A rich banker and his cousin, an unemployed chef, both covet the banker's wife, who is having an affair with a fourth person. Things end badly.

This is a one-sitting read, a whitewater ride to hell in which Lasdun hurls headlong into the psyche of his stalker, in this instance a thirty-something former chef called Matthew… In fearlessly observing sentences, Lasdun – who has an architectural imagination – unlocks room after room of Matthew’s psyche… Brilliant.

We all wish we could erase, obscure, or even simply accept the past. Perhaps the message of The Fall Guy is that, however extreme our mistakes, we will still regard them as aberrations, bizarre swerves away from our true selves, rather than what they really are: the purest expressions of our prejudices, fears and desires.

Superbly engaging and intelligent psychological thriller… A compulsively readable tale of money, power and betrayal.

A riveting psychological thriller.

The story becomes very intense as Lasdun masterfully turns the screw.

James Lasdun’s books include The Fall Guy and Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. He teaches creative writing at Columbia University and reviews regularly for the Guardian. His work has been filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci (Besieged) and he co-wrote the films Sunday, which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, and Signs and Wonders, starring Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgård.

Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountain-top house over the summer. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines. 
 
When a fourth person arrives, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. Who is the real victim? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy?

On Being Stalked

Give Me Everything You Have

A true and terrifying account of life as a stalker's obsession.

What is...most riveting about this strange and unsettling book is not the grim fascination of Lasdun’s situation; it’s the moral intelligence and intensity with which he examines it.

Give Me Everything You Have is a reminder, as if any were needed, of how easily, since the arrival of the Internet, our peace can be troubled and our good name besmirched.

James  Lasdun’s extraordinary tale of erotic obsession is so gripping...there is no greater narcotic than insanity combined with lust

A riveting memoir... This must be the most informative, the most insightful, and the most beautifully written of any account from the victim’s perspective of what has come to be called "cyberbullying".

An extraordinarily odd and disturbing story… The poet in  him is skilled at following tiny snags of thought into marvellous, rich  mini-essays.

[Lasdun] has created an elaborate tale of psychological warfare and survival, a gripping testament to the axiom that despite its risks in the twenty-first century, writing well is still the best revenge.

It is [his] willingness to appropriate his worst experience that shows Lasdun’s true courage as a writer and that enables him to turn his book into something more than just another memoir.

On every page, Lasdun’s prose is absorbing, involving and perfectly expressed.

Being cyber-bullied is terrifying; Lasdun, who is an excellent writer, conveys this beautifully… In brief: some people are crazy. The internet can amplify their crazy thought. Mud sticks. Hence this book, which is brilliant.

James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have is an autobiographical work, rare, beautiful, bitter, and profoundly accepting of his own experience: a former female student stalks him viciously for years. The story Lasdun tells is applicable to all human experience.

A striking account by this feted writer and poet of being cyberstalked.

An elegant meditation on insecurity and paranoia.

I expect it to be as brilliantly written as it is chilling.

The invisible thread of the deeply personal runs throughout.

James Lasdun’s Give Me Everything You Have is a classic of true crime. It is an account of a long and terrifying ordeal in which the author has, for years, been stalked, threatened and defamed by an obsessed woman, an ex-student of his. I had selected Give Me Everything You Have from the tall stack of books next to my bed for a nightcap read but was up until dawn with it. The author recounts the details of this spectacular persecution with wisdom, moments of humor, and grace.

What  makes the book interesting…is not the grisly details of the exchange  but Lasdun’s thoughtful analytic prose as he tries to process the  strange assault that threatened to engulf his life.

As with any kind of bullying, the victim, simply by  virtue of being victimised, becomes an object of scrutiny and self-scrutiny. In writing his book, Lasdun has  perhaps finally illuminated that personal darkness, and shone a light  for anyone who’s ever experienced anything similar.

Give Me Everything You Have is as compelling as it is terrifying, a book Lasdun had to write.

Discomfiting, often brilliant… One of the first accounts of internet stalking, and for that reason alone it should be read.

A powerful treatise on the power of the internet as a tool for harm.

Terrifically good on what it’s like to feel you have lost control of your own life.

Engrossing new memoir… A fascinating and eminently readable account of his experience… The book is also an astute mediation on anti-Semitism, online harassment, the nature of obsession and the power of the written word. His measured narrative has the suspense of a psychological thriller.

In telling this tale, it feels as though [Lasdun] is giving his stalker – and us – everything he has.

[A] luminous study of the experience of being stalked

Lasdun's extraordinary tale of erotic obsession is so gripping that I read the first 70 pages in one buttock-clenching rush

Again, [Lasdun] writes with clarity; again, his work is compelling

Haunting and unsettling to be sure, Give Me Everything You Have is a powerful piece of writing and a highly recommended read

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, Give Me Everything You Have chronicles the author’s strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled ‘verbal terrorist’, who began trying, in her words, to ‘ruin him’. Hate-mail – much of it violently anti-Semitic – online postings and public accusations of theft and sexual misconduct, have been her weapons of choice, and, as with more conventional terrorist weapons, have proved remarkably difficult to combat. 
 
James Lasdun’s account, while terrifying, is told with compassion and humour, and brilliantly succeeds in turning a highly personal story into a profound meditation on subjects as varied as madness, race, Middle-Eastern politics, and the meaning of honour and reputation in the internet age.

Water Sessions

A powerful new collection - his first in 11 years - from one of our finest poets.

The title sequence both sends up and celebrates the talking cure

Water Sessions is a collection of fine psychological acuity and astringent beauty

Sharp, slicing imagery gives Lasdun's poetry its deep notch of truth

[D]eeply literary, but cool as well... Urbane excursions in pastoral, these verses will ensure there are laurels on Lasdun's brow for many years to come

”It Isn’t Me” will doubtless illicit a pang of recognition from many readers; “Blues for Samson”, a candid but measured take on the capricious male libido, also deserves mention. In their reflective patter, formal dexterity, serio-comic tones and depth of feeling, these are the stand-out poems in an excellent book.

James Lasdun's new book of poems, his first since his acclaimed collection Landscape with Chainsaw, applies his characteristic blend of the celebratory and the elegiac to a rich variety of new themes and old obsessions. 
 
At once personal and political, Water Sessions brilliantly registers the shock waves of global tumult in the most intimately domestic of settings, while at the same time constantly feeling its way outward through private experience into the larger arenas of social and civic drama. 
 
Fathers and sons, men and women, desire and repression, art and silence, form the book's central polarities. Recurrent motifs of water and gardens give its wide-ranging subjects a satisfying coherence while also supplying its sometimes darkly urgent poems with a note of intense lyrical beauty. 
 
Much praised for the wit and tensile strength of his line, Lasdun moves in this volume from the tight formality of 'Stones' through the highly original patient/therapist dialogue form of the title poem, to the exuberant free verse of 'Dog Days', with a versatility and intelligence that ensure his standing as one of the most gifted poets writing today.

The Siege

This collection combines stories from his previous books THE SILVER AGE and THREE EVENINGS. In these stories James Lasdun views greed and excess from illuminating angles and the impulse of those who own too much to dispossess themselves. He examines the callousness by which adults lose influence over children and the instinctive tactics devised by children for gaining power over adults. He calls corruption, in its ingenious guises, to account while acknowledging the perverse fascination of human foibles. Each story casts a curious spell, in which objects and the natural world are tinged with an aura of the magical. A sensuous lyricism of prose governed by a witty and subtle intelligence brings these stories their very special flavour.

Landscape With Chainsaw

The clever, moving and often funny third collection by a major English poet.

As a field for concern in poetry, superabundance enables Lasdun to display his lavish poetic gifts

Readers who want to see rejuvenated form in untroubled action, giving brisk shape to contemporary and classical events, will find it in Lasdun

James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing...when we read him we know what language is for

Brilliant...full of linguistic panache, uncommon depths of feeling, fine ironies and taut drama. He seems to me certainly among the most gifted, vivid and deft poets now writing in English, and far better than many who are more famous. His capacities are solidly established; his promise is nearly infinite

James Lasdun's third book of poems explores the themes and tensions of his last two with a new boldness and exuberance, in a series of poems about life in the Catskill mountains outside Woodstock, where the author moved with his family some years ago. 
 
Questions of exile and belonging, cutting ties and forming new bonds, figure prominently, as does the struggle to find a viable relationship with the natural world of the mountain wilderness - at once a stunning companion and a ferocious competitor. Out of this - 'the need to carve out a niche for ourselves;/our singular relation to what we love' - rises the book's central image: the chainsaw. Very much a real machine (given to the alarmed poet by his wife), it also comes to form a complex symbol in which all manner of human traits are reflected with an intense, often comical, brilliance. 
 
A brilliantly assured, deftly lyrical sequence, Landscape with Chainsaw melds passion with wit, the classical with the quotidian, in a thrilling meditation on history, love, cultural identity and the anxiety of displacement. As an examination of the complexities of deracination and domesticity, it marks the matured genius of one of England's most important poets.

It's Beginning To Hurt

A brilliant new collection from one of our finest story writers, also a celebrated contemporary poet.

James Lasdun is probably the closest in recent years this country has come to a genuinely great practitioner of the short story

Elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching... Many writers aim to create work that is unsettling, or perhaps even painful - though not, usually, too painful to bear, at least during the actual reading of the tale. Few, however, do it so well as James Lasdun

James Lasdun seems to me to be one of the secret gardens of English writing... when we read him we know what language is for

Highly intelligent, elegantly composed, darkly haunting and greatly moving, few writers could even hope to compare with Lasdun's literary brilliance

Lasdun is a good poet; his prose here is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness

Dark, exact and bitterly funny collection... sharp, thought-provoking and fiercely readable

The narratives seem opened up to the entire history of fiction... touching...revelatory...devastating

These stories have been well made and have been carefully fitted together... undeniably classy

Inhabits his characters with the seemingly effortless sympathy of the gifted realist writer... Deserves all the honours it is able to accrue: a better book of short stories will not be published this year

a collection whose seemingly ordinary surfaces conceal precipitous depths

A good collection of short stories ought to be as enticing as a gift of fruit or flowers, even if the apple conceals a poison, the rose a canker. Few exponents of the short form offer such tempting, disturbing pleasures as James Lasdun.

Striking collection of humane short stories.

Reading Lasdun is like reading a sly collaboration between Kafka and Updike: elegant, acutely observed and utterly unflinching.

A sobering study of how humans cope when under pressure.  Lasdun's prose is undeniably sound. Ingenious sentences are strung together with ease

Short stories from a master prose miniaturist

Lasdun specialises in capturing, with unnerving insight, the split seconds in which moods and emotions turn on triggers so fine and subtle that they're barely perceptible. He nails these moments perfectly, spiking the core of the microgram of fly in the ointment and thus catching the infinitesimal moment with startling perception

James Lasdun is one of those gifted writers who seems to have avoided the attention he deserves....It's Beginning to Hurt is, in places, the best story collection I have read since Tobias Wolff's Our Story Begins.

Lasdun's third collection of short stories is nothing short of a revelation... each story is raised to amazing heights by the author's incredibly incisive prose

James Lasdun, poet, novelist, short story writer and Englishman turned American émigré, offers up permutations of suppressed inner turmoil

There is something so rich and gripping in his prose that it simply elicits your attention... It's Beginning to Hurt is a collection to jump-start your imagination

A master of the form with the enthralling psychological subtleties

Lasdun is a smart writer with an excellent sense of pace

Lasdun's prose is marked by a fine, thoughtful, humane exactness

Lasdun bravely identifies a profoundly anti-human aspect to environmental moralising to provide a study in embarrassment that made this reader wince

Superb... punchy, exhilarating collection

Deft precise language, strong narratives and great emotional insight

Lasdun's characters from New York and the Sussex countryside create a world of objects and feelings that are rich, recognisable and yet elusive, marked by the thoughtful, and humane exactness of his prose

In sharply evoked settings that range from the wilds of Northern Greece to the beaches of Cape Cod, these intensely dramatic tales chart the metamorphoses of their characters as they fall prey to the gamut of human passions. The lives in them seethe with love, hate, desire, fear, tender corruption and cruel idealism. They rise to unexpected heights of decency, stumble into comic or tragic folly, they throw themselves open to lust, longing, paranoia - but they are always recognisably, illuminatingly, our lives. 
 
Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award.

James Lasdun

The word “masterpiece” is not one to throw around lightly but I was enthralled by James Lasdun’s novella Afternoon of a Faun, from his collection Victory… it has the psychological precision of a Chekhov story.

Two superb novellas full of contemporary resonance… extraordinarily taut and compelling.

[Victory makes] a convincing case for James Lasdun as one of the most incisive investigators of the human heart writing in English today… an instant masterpiece.

The novellas [in Victory] are united by Lasdun’s signature virtues: a forensic attention to psychological detail, a mastery of dialogue and an all-round fluency that gives his prose a compelling swiftness. It is these virtues, more than the plots, that make Victory a triumph.

Timely and irresistibly unpleasant… sure to provoke passionate discussion… [Afternoon of a Faun] lingers after you have closed the book with a vividness that testifies to the compact virtues of the novella.

[James Lasdun’s] electric new book… is absorbing… [it] constantly pulls the rug from under your feet.

Afternoon of a Faun is a brilliantly imagined, devastatingly insightful and powerfully rendered novel of sexual exploitation and betrayal. Like all of James Lasdun’s work, it is meticulously written and intelligent, both a novel of ideas and a cautionary tale for the #MeToo era. Its ending is bitterly ironic, or perhaps just darkly funny, depending upon one’s perspective – and Afternoon of a Faun is about the very drama of “perspective”.

In an era of sexual reckonings and “defunct male prerogatives”, any decades-old fling is a ticking time bomb an ambivalent ex can choose to detonate at whim. Yet who’s to say what actually happened? Afternoon of a Faun is an exquisitely rendered tale of moral arithmetic, erotic murkiness, and men’s fascination with other men’s scorecards. It’s also Lasdun at his most pleasurably diabolical.

[Victory] comprises two mesmeric… impressive stories, containing beautiful descriptions and subtle twists.

Sunday Times, *Best Literary Novels of 2019*

Darkly humorous and compelling portraits of men wrestling with guilt and desire… [Afternoon of a Faun] feels very much a novel for our times.

Fascinating about the warped thought processes that often underpin male duplicity.

Feathered Glory confirms Lasdun as one of the great serio-comic writers of the age. The writing, alternately poetic and razor-sharp cynical, absorbs from start to finish.

From book to book, James Lasdun gets more and more interesting.

Bookmunch, 50 Books We're Looking Forward to in 2019

Two stunningly well-written novellas… these stories are timeless in their humorous, melancholy view of the pitfalls of love.

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2020** 
 
Two timely novellas exploring male sexual violence, power and corruption 
 
‘Victory makes a convincing case for James Lasdun as one of the most incisive investigators of the human heart writing in English today… An instant masterpiece’ Johanna Thomas-Corr, Observer 
 
Love and hate, desire and guilt, friendship and betrayal – these are the coordinates that drive James Lasdun’s two intensely gripping, darkly comic novellas of men and women caught between their irrational passions and the urge for control. 
 
In Feathered Glory the seemingly happy marriage of a school principal and his artist wife reveals dangerous fault-lines as an old lover reappears in the husband’s life. The past also haunts the present in Afternoon of a Faun, where an accusation of historic sexual assault plunges Marco Rosedale, an English journalist in New York, into a series of deepening crises. Together these stories offer a sharply observed vision that will resonate with anyone interested in the clash of power and desire in our embattled contemporary lives.

James Lasdun

Praise for Victory

The word “masterpiece” is not one to throw around lightly but I was enthralled by James Lasdun’s novella Afternoon of a Faun, from his collection Victory… it has the psychological prec ...

Two superb novellas full of contemporary resonance… extraordinarily taut and compelling.

[Victory makes] a convincing case for James Lasdun as one of the most incisive investigators of the human heart writing in English today… an instant masterpiece.

The word “masterpiece” is not one to throw around lightly but I was enthralled by James Lasdun’s novella Afternoon of a Faun, from his collection Victory… it has the psychological prec ...

Two superb novellas full of contemporary resonance… extraordinarily taut and compelling.

[Victory makes] a convincing case for James Lasdun as one of the most incisive investigators of the human heart writing in English today… an instant masterpiece.

The word “masterpiece” is not one to throw around lightly but I was enthralled by James Lasdun’s novella Afternoon of a Faun, from his collection Victory… it has the psychological prec ...

Two superb novellas full of contemporary resonance… extraordinarily taut and compelling.

[Victory makes] a convincing case for James Lasdun as one of the most incisive investigators of the human heart writing in English today… an instant masterpiece.

Books by James Lasdun

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