Outside Looking In

Boyle offers a cautionary account of those heady days as the Loney family suffers the personal costs of free love and freak-outs -- Jeffrey Burke * Mail on Sunday *
A pitch-dark sex comedy -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Mail *
The undisputed master … Boyle is brilliant at charting the currents of euphoria and idealism around Leary, the phantasmagorical effects of LSD, and Fitz’s eventual slide into self-destruction. Boyle blurs the boundaries between the fact and fiction, adding a novelistic shimmer and richness to what the histories already tell us … A roller-coaster morality tale of the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom -- Mick Brown * Daily Telegraph *
Boyle renders the hypnotic, quasi-academic mood of the commune skilfully, capturing the participants’ initial belief that this was a serious spiritual quest. This moment in the mid-Sixties before the bonkers hippy movement of the west coast took over the counter-culture from the intellectuals from the east, is fascinating … As the story of one man’s descent into madness, and the folly of communal living and doing drugs for breakfast it’s a thrilling read * The Times *
A virtuoso performance by Boyle – joyous, mad-scientist slapstick, frightening, profound and even erotic * Herald *
By far and away one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today ... A mesmerising storyteller -- Lionel Shriver
Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges -- Barbara Kingsolver
A virtuoso craftsman -- Annie Proulx
Funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at. Boyle’s dissections are far too accurate. One moment you’re watching the antics of a narcissistic cast; the next you’re finding it all heartbreakingly human -- M John Harrison
You don’t feel cheated, reading Boyle – while the head knows there’s manipulation and artifice, the heart thumps * Observer *
Boyle has a talent for describing events we may never experience with an arresting matter-of-factness. There is a thrill to this, and to not knowing where he will take us next -- Chris Power * Guardian *
A sort of Frank Zappa of American letters … Like the Beat writers before him, Boyle documents American life in the underbelly. Boyle is incapable of writing a boring sentence ... he is a master of the short story form * Financial Times *
Thomas Coraghessan Boyle isn’t the first writer to probe the American malaise, but he makes a two-fisted, Technicolor job of it * Sunday Times *
Masterful -- Philip Womack * Daily Telegraph *
Brilliant … His characters are portrayed with sympathy and internal complexity, even if they’re still crazy * New Statesman *
One of our finest chroniclers … Boyle is always going outside himself, jumping into foreign skins … The best of Boyle’s novels warn against the varieties of human extremism: our problems may be grave, he often says, but we make them worse by acting on our unexamined impulses and convictions * Independent *