Outerbridge Reach

'Fiction at its best, at once straightforward and subtle, entertaining and serious' John Banville

‘Fiction at its best, at once straightforward and subtle, entertaining and serious’ John Banville

‘A tough, elegant, alarming novel. Stone writes superbly about the sea, about fear and loneliness, about life in extremis . . . In Outerbridge Reach, he has produced what I believe will come to be recognized as a quintessential novel of the Reagan era, along with Updike’s Rabbit at Rest and Don DeLillo’s Mao II ’ John Banville, Guardian

‘Stone has already written two of the best novels of the past twenty years, Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise. Outerbridge Reach makes it three . . . He is a great storyteller, whose plots move as relentlessly as those of the best thrillers, yet his prose is elegant and full of literary allusions’ A. Alvarez, Sunday Times

‘Stone’s fifth and finest novel is about going to sea and the difficulty of trying to find a way back again . . . if one half of Stone’s characters live their secret, interior lives apart from society, then the other half are desperately looking for their own ways out: drugs, murder, revolution, betrayal, infidelity . . . and, in the case of Owen Browne in Outerbridge Reach, sailing off the map of the world and mind altogether’ Scot Bradfield, Independent

‘Its themes are contemporary and touched with cruelty . . . The toughness of Stone’s novels has been readily accepted as on the surface; but there’s an inner toughness of judgement that, when one stubs one’s toe on it, is even more impressive’ Robert M. Adams, New York Review of Books