High Dive

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.

Alex Preston, Observer - Best Novels of 2015

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.

The New Yorker

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

Independent

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.

David Nicholls, Observer, Summer Reads

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.

The New Yorker

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

Guardian

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.

New York Times

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.

Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

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

Financial Times