Outside the Gates of Eden

A story of the sixties that is generous but unflinching, sweeping but intimate, fictional but true. For everyone who's wondered how we got from there to here and also where we might go next. Hugely ambitious, simply beautiful -- Karen Joy Fowler
A powerful piece of work... The prose is terrific, and the sense of time and place is first rate. A brilliant requiem for our generation and all our dreams' -- George R.R. Martin
A history of a generation seen through the lens of music – but it's not just about music, but politics, sex, money, personal responsibility, idealism and corruption, youth and age -- John Kessel
A page-turning tour de force. Anyone with a passion for rock and roll storytelling at its very best must not deny themselves the opportunity to read this tale. A masterpiece -- Iain Matthews
In Outside the Gates of Eden Lewis Shiner displays the panoramic historical consciousness of a Pynchon or DeLillo, and yet every page is suffused with a humble and scrupulous humanity, scrubbed of abstractions or grandiosity – you simply live with his people and know them and love them -- Jonathan Lethem
An engrossing and realistic novel about such important matters as the passage of time, the disappointment of hope and the role of music in society * Times Literary Supplement *
From Woodstock to the age of Trump, this sprawling, ambitious novel straddles half a century... It is a seductive, effortless read and Shiner's brio as a storyteller never flags' * Mail on Sunday *
Absolutely bloody fantastic... Hugely uplifting, terribly sad, totally brilliant' * Weekend Sport *
A poignant and powerful swansong to the end of the twentieth century, to the demise of the wide-eyed, often drug-fuelled, innocence of the Summer of Love and Woodstock; an elegy to ideals and dreams lost. This is one of those rare books that fills me with awe and envy in equal measure -- Matthew Harffy.