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  • Published: 15 February 2016
  • ISBN: 9780099539841
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $29.99

Lurid & Cute




An extravaganza of suburban noir – complete with one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes – from Adam Thirlwell, twice selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.

'I had this vision very clearly of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, – the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute.’
In this way the hero of Adam Thirlwell’s new novel describes the book you hold between your hands: a delirious tale of backchat and low tricks, all of which begin when our hero wakes beside a woman who is bleeding, unconscious and not, unfortunately, his wife... And then, of course, events get very much worse.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2015

WINNER OF THE E.M. FORSTER AWARD 2015

  • Published: 15 February 2016
  • ISBN: 9780099539841
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

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Praise for Lurid & Cute

Lurid & Cute is a simple story of mayhem and ennui, almost a caper, but told with such satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity that everything is technicolor again. So alive, so inventive, so very good.

Joshua Ferris, author of 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour'

It’s a seductive slice of suburban noir

Sebastian Shakespeare, Tatler

Lurid & Cute is strong enough to make admirers out of detractors

Malcolm Forbes, National

Lurid & Cute, which begins as…an exercise in pure style, also reveals itself as a very earnest critique of the morals of a pampered generation

Adam Kirsch, Atlantic

Reads like a collaboration between Kundera and Murakami to adapt SJ Watson’s Before I Go To Sleep or Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl into post-modernist fiction

Guardian

The narrator of Thirlwell’s latest book may be his best creation yet… The way time works here – pulled and stretched, sped up and sped down – testifies to Thirlwell’s mastery as a storyteller… Impossible to put down

New York Times Book Review

Reading Thirlwell is like going into the happiest, cholesterol-clogged form of literary existence. Whether he’s writing about the decline and fall of our civilization or a guy who thinks he’s accidentally killed his lover, the prose bounces us into a state of fulfilled happiness and wonder

Gary Shteyngart, Salon

A dazzlingly imaginative comic noir

Financial Times

An extravagantly talented novelist

Evening Standard

A phantasmagoric tale of a modern world full of sex and violence, which is both funny and shocking.

A. S. Byatt, Spectator

Thirlwell’s narrative is packed with bold similes and outlandish events.

Daily Telegraph

The dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny.

Tamim Sadikali, Bookmunch

Beautifully told in an engaging way by a stylist at the very top of his game.

William Leith, Evening Standard

Lurid and Cute is a breathless stream of conscientiousness of an unnamed hero whose aimless life is ultimately set to self-destruction. There is an element of Tarantino in the sex, violence and freneticism of the book.

Amelia Ashton, Nudge