The Fall Guy

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

Joseph O’Neill

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.

Charles Finch, New York Times Book Review

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.

Stephanie Cross, Observer

Impossible to put down.

Daily Mail

A deftly constructed narratives of guilt and buried resentment

M. Harrison, Guardian

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.

Boston Globe

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.

James Wood

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.

Anthony Cummins, Literary Review, 2017 Books of the Year

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.

Joyce Carol Oates