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Politics
  • Published: 1 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099459026
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $50.00

Politics



Adam Thirlwell's sharp, funny, entirely original and explosive debut.

'In case you had not noticed,' writes Adam Thirlwell in his first novel, Politics, 'in this book I am not interested in anything so small as the history of the USSR. I am not writing anything so limited.'

In this epic miniature, therefore, Politics tells the story of three kids in their twenties falling in love with each in London. And, simultaneously, it tells other, smaller stories: of Stalin on the phone, Mao in the bathroom, Osip Mandelstam in another bathroom, Adolf Hitler on all fours, and Milan Kundera in an argument.

Politics is not (quite) about politics.

  • Published: 1 September 2004
  • ISBN: 9780099459026
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $50.00

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.

Also by Adam Thirlwell

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Praise for Politics

One of the funniest, most stylish and utterly original debuts in years

The Times

Politics deserves your immediate attention

Matt Thorne, Independent

This is a clever book. Fantastically clever...funny and strangely insightful... A genuinely original book

Daily Mail

Adam Thirlwell is a craftsman - a master builder... Hugely entertaining... I have read this book twice. I shall read it again

Scotsman

Dazzling...clever, funny and original

India Knight, Observer

Extremely accomplished...very sophisticated

A S Byatt, Guardian

Thirlwell's debut drips with cool

Alastair Sooke, Daily Telegraph

Allusive, barbed, cocky, flamboyant, reckless, obscene and very funny

Time Out

This book is a literary sensation... Politics really is the novel of the twenty-first century

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

A book you immediately want to give to all of your friends...irresisitibly funny and true

Le Monde

A new and great talent

La Repubblica