SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2012 ENCORE AWARD 
 
JOY is a hugely inventive, ambitious and absorbing novel about pleasure, love, loss and work

A brilliant book... Jonathan Lee is one of those rare, agile writers who can take your breath away.

Catherine O’Flynn, author of What Was Lost

Exquisitely and surprisingly written…[Joy] proves that Lee is a significant talent and that his future work should be well worth awaiting.

Outstanding ... a forensic portrayal of despair that shows Lee to be an exceptional, brave prose stylist... Funny and humane, Joy is an enormously impressive piece of storytelling.

Jonathan Lee’s second novel, Joy (William Heinemann), charts the final day in the life of a high-flying young lawyer. Lee writes with extraordinary vividness, with prose so sharply defined it takes your breath away.

With its supple prose, ingenious structure, wit and slow-burn sympathy, Joy is a sly miracle of a novel.

Lee constructs office scenes easily, weaving together numerous characters and dialogues with flair…the writing crackles.

Lee expertly unfoldshis narrative, leading his readers up cul-de-sacs only to reveal their purpose several chapters later. We learn about those who seem to think they knew Joy in their sessions with a counsellor which alternate with her own account. It’s a structure that could easily have backfired but Lee handles it deftly so that each narrative throws light on the other, allowing characters to reveal themselves rather than relying on clunky descriptions. There’s a good deal of black humour in their self revelations and the novel is peppered with nicely comic throwaway remarks. The whole coheres beautifully, leading readers entertainingly to the novel’s shocking and sobering conclusion. Highly recommended, and out in paperback in the first week of June.

One of Britain’s most exciting writers… A wonderful book.

Very stylish, observant and oh so spiky, this is an incredible, often uncomfortable novel that you just can't put down... Modern, vibrant, funny and dark  5/5

Lee's the real deal - a British writer on the cusp of greatness... A brilliant powerful dissection of modern Britain.

an excellent novel… A harrowing look at the sleazy underbelly of the corporate world that never pulls its punches.

[A] discomforting and acute tragicomedy ... The bleaker and darker his book becomes, the better it gets, building to a shocking and expertly executed conclusion. Tipped for the top on publication of his first novel, Lee here confirms his talent

For all painful events it covers, this is a joyful book. Lee educates us in the beautiful mess of humanity surrounding this tragic event. Joy is one of the best new novels this year.

A black comedy of exuberance and bite … original, and brilliantly executed; the characters’ voices … ventriloquised with flair … This is the wittiest, most addictive piece of literary yuppie-bashing since Martin Amis’s Money. Lee is a writer to keep an eye on.

A major new voice in British fiction.

A brilliant book... Jonathan Lee is one of those rare, agile writers who can take your breath away.

[Joy] displays a real flair for narrative and characterisation…Highly accomplished…The closest comparison that can be made is with Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, which shares a similarly bravura command of narrative voice…Exquisitely and surprisingly written…it proves that Lee is a significant talent and that his future work should be well worth awaiting.

Lee’s writing is witty and engaging, containing something of the wearied disgust of Raymond Chandler’s prose…These four voices confiding in the counsellor are entertainingly distinct…The novel’s outstanding achievement, however, is the central, spiralling narrative that Jonathan Lee threads among these personal accounts: the intimate story of how Joy came to fall, a forensic portrayal of despair that shows Lee to be an exceptional, brave prose stylist. The dark revelations in the book’s final pages are disturbing while not gratuitous, but Lee also allows some credible room for optimism among these cluttered lives. Funny and humane, Joy is an enormously impressive piece of storytelling

Lee's the real deal - a British writer on the cusp of greatness. This novel follows the aftermath of lawyer Joy Stephen's apparent suicide. The corporate and personal explode in a brilliant powerful dissection of modern Britain.

Jonathan Lee’s second novel, Joy charts the final day in the life of a high-flying young lawyer. Lee writes with extraordinary vividness, with prose so sharply defined it takes your breath away.

With its supple prose, ingenious structure, wit and slow-burn sympathy, Joy is a sly miracle of a novel.

[One] of Britain’s most exciting writers… I loved how Jonathan Lee’s Joy gradually unravels through different characters…The ending of Joy is brilliantly shocking. I finished it three weeks ago and it’s still playing on my mind… Something about Joy’s slow and brooding story really affected me…Lee manages to make every voice distinct…It is Joy’s complexity which keeps you reading…[A] wonderful book.

Lee constructs office scenes easily, weaving together numerous characters and dialogues with flair…the writing crackles.

Jonathan Lee was born in 1981 in Surrey. His first novel, Who is Mr Satoshi?, was nominated for the Desmond Elliot Prize 2011 and shortlisted for an MJA Open Book Award 2011. The BBC’s Culture Show programme recently featured him as being one of Britain’s ‘best new novelists’. He lives in New York.

In a sparkling glass office in London’s Square Mile – a place bursting with flirtations, water-cooler confrontations and dangerous amounts of abject boredom – talented young lawyer Joy Stephens falls forty feet onto a marble floor. 
 
In the shadow of this baffling event, the lives of those closest to her begin to collide and change in unexpected ways…

Who is Mr Satoshi?

Inventive and mysterious, WHO IS MR SATOSHI? introduces a major new talent to contemporary fiction.

Compelling, funny and beautifully written, this novel is one of those rare treats - a book you won't want to put down

Jennie Rooney, author of INSIDE THE WHALE

Jonathan Lee paints an exhilarating portrait of modern day Tokyo in limpid, intelligent prose as we accompany his narrator along his wildly labyrinthine voyage through the city.

Funny and moving, Who Is Mr Satoshi? introduces another newcomer who will catch prize judges' attentions. Set in Japan, it concerns Rob Fossick, an English photographer who has been unable to work since his wife died. When his mother, too, is suddenly killed, he discovers she has left instructions that he must deliver a package to a mysterious Mr Satoshi in Tokyo. Lurching from crisis to crisis as he stumbles drunk and weeping through a strange culture, he engages the help of a pink-haired Japanese girl and a former sumo wrestler. Fossick (a great name for someone on a quest) eventually unravels a mystery stretching back to the time of the Allied occupation.

Giles Foden, author of THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND

an elegant and incisive examination of how history and our perceptions of the world are partial, filtered, and continually revised...Who is Mr Satoshi? ask[s] intriguing questions about how we see, remember and narrate our lives.

Confident, sharply-written, and refreshingly direct...Tokyo is, of course, a descriptive writer's dream and Lee is not cowed by that culture's omnipresent and exhaustive literary heritage; he instead revels in his character's conflicts...[The] dialogue is playful and well-observed...More experienced authors might milk drug-addled protagonists for all they're worth; Lee's subtlety in this regard speaks volumes of the appeal, depth and maturity of his central character, as well as his writing.

"Assured debut" is a tired old phrase, but it really does sum up this first novel...Satisfying, well-paced, just the right length for the story it's telling, Who Is Mr Satoshi? is a literary novel that also happens to be a highly accessible one...Lee skilfully and inexorably draws us into his story as the clues mount up to Mr Satoshi's identity...Lee's prose manages to maintain...a sparse elegance that does great service to the characters and setting and bodes well for his future.

Lee lays the groundwork for Foss's trip with care...patiently weaving exposition into early events...Lee has a pleasingly straightforward style...spiced with metaphoric flourishes...A promising first novel.

There's an almost dream-like quality to the narrative...An unusual, playful and clever book.

Who is Mr Satoshi? is a clever, gripping and unusual novel that provides a whole host of hugely enjoyable mysteries. It is also a sensitive portrayal of a man brought back from the brink of breakdown. Reminiscent of some of Haruki Murakami's best work, this is a debut to treasure.

Jonathan Lee was born in Surrey in 1981. He graduated from the University of Bristol with a First in English Literature and then, after spending some time living in South America, went on to become a solicitor at a City law firm. In 2007 he was posted to the firm's Tokyo office, and during his time there became increasingly interested in Japanese culture and history. On his return to London he began writing his first novel, Who is Mr Satoshi?

On the day his mother dies reclusive photographer Rob Fossick - forty-one and already in the twilight of his career - finds among her belongings an unexplained package addressed to a 'Mr Satoshi'. 
 
So begins a quest that will propel Rob, anxious and unprepared, into the urban maelstrom of Tokyo. With the help of a colourful group of new acquaintances - a vigilant octogenarian; a beautiful 'love hotel' receptionist; an ex-sumo wrestler obsessed with Dolly Parton - the scene seems set for him to unravel the secrets surrounding Mr Satoshi's identity. But until he has faced his own demons, and begun to reconnect with the world around him, the answers Rob craves will remain tantalisingly beyond his reach ... 
 
Combining several interlocking mysteries spanning sixty years of history, Who Is Mr Satoshi? is a uniquely inventive story from a dazzling new voice in British fiction.

Jonathan Lee

Lee’s powerful novel is an extraordinary performance: vividly written, painfully human and fully fleshing the inner lives of its characters.

High Dive did for the Brighton bombings what Garth Risk Hallberg's overhyped City on Fire attempted to do for the New York City blackout - it's a multivoiced epic that builds towards a stunning finale. I loved it.

Achingly good … Satisfyingly tricky when it comes to speeding up and slowing down, keeping readers off balance, teasing them about when what’s already irrevocable is actually going to happen … At his best – and he is at it often – Lee displays a nimble metaphysical wit and a verbal ingenuity on a par with Martin Amis … In High Dive, the ticktock means more than the boom… The novel’s last, almost whispered word about the bombing’s carnage is left to stand among the most devastating observations ever made about terrorism: “Someone had considered this fair”. It is Jonathan Lee’s great achievement to have written, on this of all subjects, one of the gentlest novels in memory.

Jonathan Lee [is] a wordsmith of incomparable eloquence…High Dive is a work of serious and thoughtful integrity.

An ingenious and original mixture of the domestic and the political, set in the days leading up to the Brighton bombing of 1984. At its heart is a father-and-daughter relationship that feels uncannily real and wonderfully touching.

Achingly good … on a par with Martin Amis … In High Dive, the ticktock means more than the boom… The novel’s last, almost whispered word about the bombing’s carnage is left to stand among the most devastating observations ever made about terrorism: “Someone had considered this fair”. It is Jonathan Lee’s great achievement to have written, on this of all subjects, one of the gentlest novels in memory.

Hauntingly atmospheric ... Lee is quite brilliant at excavating the disappointment of characters constantly chasing lost opportunities.

Devastating ... Inspired ... We make so many complex emotional investments in the lives of Lee's characters that it takes a monk's restraint not to flip to the very end of the book before you get there.

High Dive is a novel so smart and compassionate and beautifully written that it asks for total immersion. A reader will hold her breath for long, perfectly-paced stretches, and she will surface, dizzied, at the end.

The novel is full of gentle humour: its tones are mostly warm and compassionate…High Dive is a moving and charismatic novel…It succeeds, through its multiple sympathies and scrupulous empathy, on its own terms

Engrossing … Effortlessly switching between Belfast and Brighton in stylist prose that perfectly captures the tension and tenor of the times, it’s highly recommended.

Novels about terrorism aren’t usually this tender. It’s Lee’s way of bringing home the cost of bloodshed ... A tragi-comic tale full of warmth and muddled humanity.

High Dive is a fascinating look into a troubled past. In taut scene after taut scene, with a fine style and wit among the carnage, Jonathan Lee does service to history and the novel both.

Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End

Lee masterfully ekes poetry out of everyday life…As a character study High Dive is faultless. Freya, Moose and Dan exist, you know them, they are gloriously and fully realized.

Lee has crafted an absorbing character piece that feels startlingly real. Even though the dread of the looming disaster is always there, the main characters’ stories are given plenty of room to breathe and their mundane struggles with everyday life are extremely relatable. High Dive is funny, troublesome and poignant, and will cement Lee’s reputation.

Lee is a virtuoso storyteller, combining the skills of a historian, a reporter, a criminal psychologist, and most importantly, a close observer of the complexity of everyday life.

The language [is] beautiful from the start ... He has a real gift for writing ... beautifully written throughout.

Hauntingly atmospheric ... Lee is quite brilliant at excavating the disappointment of characters constantly chasing lost opportunities ... The protagonists generate a static energy, gathering charged particles of the particular ... The IRA used a long-delay detonator on the Brighton bomb and Lee employs this modus operandi himself, cleverly allowing their plot to provide his. Having planted this device we are left with the drama of waiting, a surface tension that holds the somewhat diffuse elements together. There are echoes of Beckett ... High Dive is, of course, a historical novel, detailing events that took place more than 30 years ago, yet there is always a sense of immediacy to the prose ... In the mundane, Jonathan Lee finds the deep end, where all are diving for dear life.

I loved Jonathan Lee's High Dive . . . It is brilliantly observed.

Marvellous ... one of the surprises of the book – which opens with the brutal initiation into the Provisional IRA of Dan, the third of the three protagonists, and ends with the front of the Grand being ripped out – is that it is frequently funny.

“What would it feel like to fall from a great height? In this highly accomplished third novel, this is a sensation that characters experience both physically, high diving at the local swimming pool, and metaphorically, plunging into despair when they lose their most uplifting relationships. The absorbing plot moves between Belfast and Brighton, culminating on 12 October 1984, when a bomb exploded at Brighton’s Grand hotel, where Margaret Thatcher was staying during the Conservative party conference. The author powerfully uses a prismatic range of perspectives: Dan, an IRA bomber; Moose, the deputy manager of the hotel; and Moose’s 18-year-old daughter, Freya. The political is intricately interwoven with the personal and the novel’s most moving sections chronicle the implosion of Moose’s marriage and morale. Lee dives deep into the minds and hearts of his characters, skilfully shoring up “the private moments history so rarely records”.

Jonathan Lee may not be a name tripping off many readers’ tongues today, but my guess it soon will be ... In an age when anonymity is a struggle, Lee seems to have mastered the art, with biographical details scant on this British-born writer who currently lives in New York. Such lack of context makes even more intriguing that his third novel, the utterly absorbing and beautifully wrought High Dive, should be a reimagining of the events surrounding the bombing of The Grand Hotel in Brighton by the IRA during the Conservative Party conference in 1984. The novel weaves its way towards the tragedy, between Belfast and Brighton, and in the company of three main protagonists: Dan, a young IRA convert, the long-rumoured but never located second bomber; Freya, a bright school-leaver working at the Grand Hotel; and her father Moose, the aspirant Assistant General Manager.

What is clear straight away is how good Lee is on character…Lee has a memorable turn of phrase…He can be funny too…Deftly captures the boorishness of a Tory conference.

A beautifully realized novel about the intertwining of loyalty, family, ambition and politics. Lee’s truest antecedent is not The Day of the Jackal, but Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent … Its narrative works like the long-fuse bomb that is placed fairly early on in the proceedings, slowly ticking away under the floorboards of the reader’s mind, getting louder and more fraught as the detonation approaches … Although the matters at hand – terrorism, mortality, failure – are weighty, High Dive carries itself with an admirable lightness … Long after the bomb goes off, long after I closed the book, I found myself wondering about Moose and Freya and Dan. That persistence of interest is a testament to how fully realized those characters are, and how astonishingly well executed this novel is.

An idiosyncratic imagining of the Brighton boming of 1984 . . . The scenes of everyday life in the hotel are rich in the comedy of the mundane: the hopes and petty quarrels neatly contrasted with the approaching terror, the actors in the drama ignorant of what the reader knows is coming.

A completely absorbing novel about the lives of people who struggle in small and massive ways. Lee’s writing is poignant, fluid, and very funny. Above all else it feels honest – you can see yourself in all of his characters. I really did love this book, and I’m still thinking and worrying about it.

Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds Singing

With wry wit and profound tenderness, Jonathan Lee’s High Dive highlights the tensions---between hope and heartbreak, struggle and surrender---at the intersection of the mundane and the momentous. A bold, thrilling triumph of a book.

In the run up to the bombing Lee masterfully fleshes out the three characters, moving back into their respective histories and creating around them a painfully real world populated by unfulfilled dreams (Freya), ill health (Moose) and odd jobs (Dan)…Lee masterfully ekes poetry out of everyday life…As a character study High Dive is faultless. Freya, Moose and Dan exist, you know them, they are gloriously and fully realized…For sheer beauty of description and engaging personal tone my recommendation is High Dive.

High Dive is gripping from the very first page; we see Dan’s initiation into the IRA and we’re introduced to his elusive and enigmatic boss Dawson McCartland. Jonathan Lee ensures the novel is tense and disturbing from start to finish …High Dive is a carefully paced, melancholic and thought-provoking historical novel. Lee writes the most ordinary and mundane details of daily life in such a stunning way that none of it is boring.

In fluent, agile prose Jonathan Lee takes on one of the more famous assassination plots in recent history with striking evenhandedness and depth. His novel offers a funny, gripping and ultimately tragic view into the life of a young IRA  man and the dear price he, and his victims, pay during the dark years of the Troubles.

Ayana Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

Lee is a writer of concision, humour, wisdom and danger.

High Dive is both wistful and very funny. It is also genuinely lyrical. But more than anything, what distinguishes it from so many other novels is its rare sincerity.

Alexander Maksik, author of You Deserve Nothing

[Full of] sensitivity to the complexity of human motivations . . . memorable.

Every assassination is a plot with personal history and national history intertwined, action and inaction offsetting each other, misstep transforming into opportunity, luck submitting to fate. Jonathan Lee is a virtuoso storyteller, combining the skills of a historian, a reporter, a criminal psychologist, and most importantly, a close observer of the complexity of everyday life. What a thrilling new novel.

Yiyun Li, author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

It’s 1978. Meet Dan, a Belfast boy who wants to join the IRA. Now meet Freya, a young woman who works in the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Dan checks in. So does Margaret Thatcher. We know what will happen.

Evening Standard, 'Paperbacks of the Year'

‘A meticulous and gripping reimagination of the Brighton bomb’ Observer, Best Novels of 2015 
 
In September 1984, a man calling himself Roy Walsh checked into The Grand Hotel in Brighton and planted a bomb in room 629. The device was primed to explode in twenty-four days, six hours and six minutes, when intelligence had confirmed that Margaret Thatcher and her whole cabinet would be staying in the hotel. 
 
Moving between the luxurious hospitality of a British tourist town and the troubled city of Belfast, and told from the perspectives of a young IRA explosives expert, the deputy hotel manager and his teenage daughter, High Dive is a taut and tender retelling of one of the most ambitious assassination attempts against the British establishment.

Jonathan Lee

Praise for High Dive

Lee’s powerful novel is an extraordinary performance: vividly written, painfully human and fully fleshing the inner lives of its characters.

High Dive did for the Brighton bombings what Garth Risk Hallberg's overhyped City on Fire attempted to do for the New York City blackout - it's a multivoiced epic that builds towards a stunning finale. ...

Achingly good … Satisfyingly tricky when it comes to speeding up and slowing down, keeping readers off balance, teasing them about when what’s already irrevocable is actually going to happen … At his best ...

Lee’s powerful novel is an extraordinary performance: vividly written, painfully human and fully fleshing the inner lives of its characters.

High Dive did for the Brighton bombings what Garth Risk Hallberg's overhyped City on Fire attempted to do for the New York City blackout - it's a multivoiced epic that builds towards a stunning finale. ...

Achingly good … Satisfyingly tricky when it comes to speeding up and slowing down, keeping readers off balance, teasing them about when what’s already irrevocable is actually going to happen … At his best ...

Lee’s powerful novel is an extraordinary performance: vividly written, painfully human and fully fleshing the inner lives of its characters.

High Dive did for the Brighton bombings what Garth Risk Hallberg's overhyped City on Fire attempted to do for the New York City blackout - it's a multivoiced epic that builds towards a stunning finale. ...

Achingly good … Satisfyingly tricky when it comes to speeding up and slowing down, keeping readers off balance, teasing them about when what’s already irrevocable is actually going to happen … At his best ...

Books by Jonathan Lee

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