Seven Lies
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:1st Feb '07
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
A superb second novel looking at the nature of deceit and desire. 'A master at ensnaring the reader... Intense, powerful and superbly crafted' - The Times
Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, this book tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, whose yearnings for love, glory and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. It offers an examination of the architecture of deceit.
**LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE**
Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, longs for love, glory and freedom - yearnings that express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. The hopeless son of an ambitious mother and a kind but unlucky diplomat, Stefan lurches between his budding, covert interests - girls and Romantic poetry - to find himself embroiled in dissident politics, which oddly seems to offer both.
In time, by a series of blackly comic and increasingly dangerous manoeuvres, he contrives to make his fantasy come true, finding himself not only in the country of his dreams, but also married to the woman he idolises. America seems everything he expected and meanwhile his secrets are safely locked away behind the Berlin Wall.
A new life of unbounded bliss seems to have been granted to him. And then that life begins to fall apart...
A riveting, thrillerish plot. Here is a stylist who's also a fabulous storyteller... A treat * Daily Telegraph *
An elegant, moving and intelligent book * Irish Times *
Gripping and beautifully written * Scotsman *
Grips the reader from the start... Lean, artful, assured * Spectator *
James Lasdun is a tremendous writer and Seven Lies is that rare thing, a novel that delivers on every level. It is so gripping that you want to gobble it down at a single sitting, and yet the prose is so exacting that you want to linger over every sentence -- Geoff Dyer
The descriptive brilliance leaves a lasting impression -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Financial Times *
Lasdun's second novel has much of the thriller about it. But its more sinuous power comes from other duplicities in Stefan's previous life: a glorious section of the book involves his teenage self plagiarising Walt Whitman to impress his mother's salon, all the while bribing a pederast janitor with aquavit to gain access to the source material -- Alex Clark * Observer *
The imaginativeness with which he explores the politics of expectation and failure runs deep...Seven Lies combines the knuckle-whitening tension of a thriller with literary wit and the precision of a surgeon seeking to tease out rotten flesh. Definitely a novel to be admired * Economist *
Seven Lies...has a way of enlarging the spirit and refreshing the mind far more comprehensively than many books with twice its 200 pages -- James Buchan * Guardian *
[T]his seems to be an artful evocation of the effect of totalitarianism on the individual. But if this sounds drably psychological, I am doing the novel a disservice: it is short, intense, powerful and superbly crafted -- Chris Power * The Times *
- Short-listed for James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Fiction) 2007
ISBN: 9780099483687
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 13mm
Weight: 149g
208 pages