Wreaking

A brilliantly imagined and unsettling novel from the award-winning author of Heliopolis and The Amnesia Clinic

This stays with you; an eccentric wonder about a disaffected, dying man, living in an abandoned insane asylum and various sinister, satellite characters; it's one of the most lyrical, gorgeously descriptive English novels of recent years - bafflingly ignored by prize judges

There can be no doubting the remarkable scope of this writer’s imagination, nor the skill of his prose. He has a genius for atmosphere... If Charles Dickens is one influence, Breaking Bad is surely another

A gripping exploration of mental illness… A compelling update of a Gothic novel… The real pleasure of this book is Mr Scudamore’s masterly and unflinching prose

A quietly remarkable novel that resonates with universality

Wreaking itself is drawn brilliantly with both precise and pungent descriptions… The descriptions of teenage boredom by the sea and adult ennui in the city are stingingly realised… Sharply hewn, inventively structured and unnervingly written

A self-conscious and self-reflexive novel. It is the building itself that looms largest… And though, like Thornfield and Manderley, we find Wreaking broken by time, weather and debt, it commands our attention

A creepy chronicle of abuse, abandonment and unrequited love… So much here is brilliant

Everything we most want to know, the author quietly looks away from, until the story becomes as layered, contorted and interrupted as the collapsing architecture of Wreaking itself. Then time straightens out and speeds up suddenly… Everything connects. Everything comes to light. Everything is revealed, yet somehow the buckling of time induced by subjectivity, madness and metaphor makes it all just as hard to see

The question of what constitutes madness... is intelligently explored. Bold, grotesque, bawdy...memorable

Settings don’t come much more Gothic than Wreaking, the derelict, decaying...psychiatric hospital of James Scudamore’s striking third novel

This is the work of a writer totally at ease with, and confident in, his powers. A wonderfully assured novel with scope and ambition and with enough of a mystery at its heart to keep the reader hooked till the end

We are left with the characters in our heads for days, and the sense of unease that Scudamore cleverly conjures up

A twisted, unsettling tale of family lies and lonely souls

An immersion in the physical and psychic ruins of a contemporary Britain which enchants and disturbs, lures and repels. The inner poetry and descriptive mastery of James Scudamore's Wreaking are riches which cannot be forgotten. If you only read one novel in coming times, make it this astonishing and deeply moving chronicle

This is an impressive work from the critically acclaimed author of Heliopolis

James Scudamore is the author of the novels Wreaking, Heliopolis, and The Amnesia Clinic. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and been nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Man Booker Prize. 
 
www.jamesscudamore.com

'People who say there aren't any brilliant literary novels about contemporary England anymore have obviously never read this.' Irvine Welsh 
 
A brilliantly imagined and unsettling novel from the award-winning author of Heliopolis and The Amnesia Clinic 
 
Three solitary characters remember their shared past in a sprawling, derelict psychiatric hospital on the English coast: a turbulent summer in the aftermath of the hospital's closure that culminated in a shocking, life-altering accident. But the more each tries to comprehend the past, the more elusive it becomes. Wreaking is an intricate, labyrinthine novel about the opiate power of place, the fragility of sanity and the fickle nature of memory.

Heliopolis

A brilliantly original rags-to-riches tale, reminiscent of City of God, by the award-winning author of The Amnesia Clinic. 
 
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Fast-paced with ingenious and constant twists, brilliantly sharp... an unsettling and magically compelling read

Merits the epithet Dickensian in a number of ways: In its generous anger at injustice and inequality, its attention to the lives of the poor, and its relish for food... But, as with Dickens, you don't read this for the plot, but for the power of the writing, the descriptions that fizz off the page, and the lust for life

The writing is exemplary: you feel the hand of a natural at work

Scudamore has the superb novelist's gift for giving vivid, sympathetic life to even second string characters, as well as his main ones; he also has the extraordinary power of summoning an entire brooding, smoggy city to life. Most of all, he has the ability to take on the heaviest of themes with the lightest and most compelling of touches, and leave you with an appetite for more

Scudamore is an accomplished stylist...he skewers the excesses and banality of advertising with panache...a triumph, in particular in its depiction of third word urban sprawl

The writing is exemplary: you feel the hand of a natural at work, one whose command of tone is strong, and who has an instinctive feel for handling a story

Heliopolis is written in beautiful, clear prose, at ease equally with the flittering, dangerous games of the socialites and with the pungent depths of the slums...James Scudamore has produced a fascinating study of a young man's awakening and a city of peril

Seven Magazine, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year

A book that will linger in your consciousness long after you put it down

Ludo is a fascinatingly flawed narrator, and the language is alive with livid, unsettling imagery

James Scudamore again achieves something magical

Slinkily assured... a steamlined fantasy summons up a teeming citadel where the wealthy take to their helicopters "like fat flies", leaving migrant workers to swarm below

There is so much... brilliantly at work in James Scudamore's Heliopolis that it seems arbitrary to praise one element over another

As a child Ludo is plucked out of the shantytown where he was born and transported to a world of languid, cosseted luxury. Now twenty-seven, he works high above the above the sprawling metropolis of São Paulo for a vacuous 'communications company'. But this is not his world, and this is not a simple rags-to-riches story: Ludo's destiny moves him around like a chess piece, showing him both extremities of opulent excess and abject poverty, taking him to the brink of madness and brutality. 
 
By the author of The Amnesia Clinic and winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.

The Amnesia Clinic

Rich in South American colour, this cleverly crafted novel deals with storytelling itself - the motivations for spinning a yarn and the consequences of taking a tale too far. 
 
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award.

Scudamore has produced a clever, witty and believable debut. A fantastic read

A polished debut... Turns the tables on both characters and readers as imagination segues into dangerous reality

Scudamore has fun blurring the edges of truth and fiction, creating fantastic and colourful stories within stories

Bewitching...Highly recommended. Scudamore has talent to burn

A wonderful debut -  witty, polished, fluent and effortlessly entertaining

A nostalgic, compelling adventure laced with black humour

A compulsively readable novel about the seductiveness of storytelling... Both his characters and the electrifying manner in which Scudamore writes about Ecuador demonstrate the appeal as well as the danger of any fabulist's capacity for wonder

Anti, a quiet English boy living in Quito, Ecuador, strikes up a friendship with flamboyant classmate Fabián, who is everything Anti isn't: handsome, athletic and popular. What's more, he lives with his rakish Uncle Suarez, while Anti is stuck in the dull ex-pat world inhabited by his parents. 
 
Suarez, a storyteller par excellence, infects the boys with his passion for outlandish tales, and before long their relationship becomes one conducted entirely through the telling of tales. One subject, however, is taboo: Fabián's parents. But when details surrounding their disappearance begin to emerge, Anti decides to console his friend with a story suggesting that Fabián's mother may be living at a bizarre hospital on the coast for patients with memory loss. With confused emotions and reality losing its tenuous grip, the boys embark on a quixotic voyage across Ecuador in search of an 'Amnesia Clinic' that may, or may not exist. 
 
The Amnesia Clinic won the Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

James Scudamore

James Scudamore is now a force in the English novel, his voice calm and assured. English Monsters is psychologically astute as a study of collusion and denial, and effective as a picture of time and class; but it has wider reach, as a story about the limits of empathy, the ease of retribution and the difficulty of justice

Breathtakingly good. Imagine Edward St Aubyn writing The Secret History and you’ll get an idea of how exquisite and compelling this story about male friendship and betrayal is

Heart-wrenching... A searing indictment of a culture that downplays and covers up horrors... Harrowing, deeply moving and richly insightful, this is Scudamore’s best novel yet

The pages bubble with quiet rage about an elite education system that wrecks even those it elevates... Scudamore is here for the long haul

There are few prizes that Scudamore hasn’t been nominated for, and English Monsters will only add to his impressive tally… Scudamore’s insights are keen and his masterfully evocative writing never less than assured… His descriptions of [Max’s schooldays] etch themselves into your brain

Written in cool, clear-eyed prose, English Monsters is a taut psychological thriller and an astute comment on the institutional neuroses that now haunt our nation

English Monsters is a tremendously moving novel. What can be done in the face of unspeakable and complicated trauma? What if silence, action, vengeance and loyalty fail the person in need? James Scudamore has given us a timely, provocative work allowing past and present, with all their truths and apprehensions, to shift like rising waters.

Scudamore deftly balances creepiness and tenderness…while retaining a cool anger at the imperial mindset that the boarding school system cultivates… English Monsters is one of the most well-observed novels I’ve read on the way that childhood abuse lingers into adulthood.

[English Monsters] has echoes of Edward St Aubyn’s (more sardonic) Patrick Melrose series and Hanya Yanagihara’s (more lurid) A Little Life. It contains resonant phrases...on almost every page

English Monsters has the pace and intensity of the best kind of thriller, married to an almost unbearable poignancy. I've never read a novel as good and wise on trauma as it moves through the generations, but with such a light touch. There are moments in it that will stay with me forever

A slow-burn chiller... An intelligent novel in which the horror lies not in explicit scenes of cruelty but rather in Scudamore’s lack of squeamishness about his subject’s queasier psychological corners

Dark, tender, troubling... It is impossible to read these pages and not to think of the present blight of emotionally cauterised boarding-school politicians whose various pathologies, fantasies and defence mechanisms Britain must continue to endure... [English Monsters] render[s] the dense and knotted contours of pain and shame and guilt in the hearts of the victims...with commendable imaginative skill and honesty.

A very impressive novel. Scudamore lightly, deftly conjures the closed world of an institution in which the men who spin the boys’ future are both magicians and monsters. The damage of patriarchy plays down the generations, its story told by a young outsider who more or less got away

I'd like to recommend...James Scudamore's English Monsters, a beautifully written meditation on the kind of English masculinity from which out current leaders suffer.

Scudamore is skilled at creating atmosphere… A gripping meditation on class relations and formative friendships.

From the very title, English Monsters is politely merciless about that most English of traits, suppression. On relationships it is heartfelt and unshirking. What stays with me most though is the tenderness at the heart of the novel. Love we don't choose, that is just there; and how this throws all those loves we try to engineer into the wind

Scudamore has an eye for physical details… His ear for comforting platitudes, especially those between men and boys, is also unerring.

Reminiscent of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and The Hiding Game by Naomi Wood, both in its anachronistic narrative structure and plot... Worth reading for fans of coming-of-age novels.

Scudamore is deft at capturing the way in which you can be drawn to someone despite knowing the worst of them. There is a bitter acknowledgement that monsters come in many forms - and many are difficult to resist.

Steeped in violence and secrecy… This exploration of the long-term effects of abuse…is both convincing and chilling.

[An] affecting depiction of the dark side of Englishness

A disquieting coming-of-age tale that, in many passages, unfurls like an English comedy of manners – only one that, at any time, can suddenly be darkened by long shadows.

'James Scudamore is now a force in the English novel' Hilary Mantel 
 
'A very impressive novel' Sarah Moss 
 
When ten-year-old Max is sent to boarding school, his idyllic childhood comes to an abrupt end. Away from the freedom of his grandfather's farm, a world of rules and punishment awaits. But so too does the companionship of a close-knit group of classmates. 
 
Years later, as Max and his friends face down adulthood, a dark secret from their schooldays is revealed, drawing them together in unforeseen ways. Who knew what, and when? And who now wants to see justice done? 
 
'Breathtakingly good' Observer 
 
'Dark, tender, troubling' Guardian

James Scudamore

Praise for English Monsters

James Scudamore is now a force in the English novel, his voice calm and assured. English Monsters is psychologically astute as a study of collusion and denial, and effective as a picture of time ...

Breathtakingly good. **Imagine Edward St Aubyn writing The Secret History and you’ll get an idea of how exquisite and compelling this story about male friendship and betrayal is**

Heart-wrenching... A searing indictment of a culture that downplays and covers up horrors... Harrowing, deeply moving and richly insightful, this is Scudamore’s best novel yet

James Scudamore is now a force in the English novel, his voice calm and assured. English Monsters is psychologically astute as a study of collusion and denial, and effective as a picture of time ...

Breathtakingly good. **Imagine Edward St Aubyn writing The Secret History and you’ll get an idea of how exquisite and compelling this story about male friendship and betrayal is**

Heart-wrenching... A searing indictment of a culture that downplays and covers up horrors... Harrowing, deeply moving and richly insightful, this is Scudamore’s best novel yet

James Scudamore is now a force in the English novel, his voice calm and assured. English Monsters is psychologically astute as a study of collusion and denial, and effective as a picture of time ...

Breathtakingly good. **Imagine Edward St Aubyn writing The Secret History and you’ll get an idea of how exquisite and compelling this story about male friendship and betrayal is**

Heart-wrenching... A searing indictment of a culture that downplays and covers up horrors... Harrowing, deeply moving and richly insightful, this is Scudamore’s best novel yet

Books by James Scudamore

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