Review
“The prose, winging between stateliness and the coarsest urban patois, is fluent and flawless.” —Independent
“Strange, creepy, often brilliant” —Financial Times
“Often in the last scene, often in the last line, O'Brien . . . withdraws his offer of a pint of mild in the local piss-palace and nails your bottom lip to the bar instead.” —Times Literary Supplement
Product Description
Chain-smoking alcoholics, warring academics, gothic stalkers, and aspiring writers are just some of the visitors that browse the mysterious library at the heart of this sinister novel. Idlers and idolizers alike can be referenced, in body or in text, among the crepuscular alcoves and dim staircases of this seemingly unassuming building. The secret to a family curse, a dog-eared first edition of Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium, the gruesome fate of a feminist literary theorist—all are available to simply take down from the shelf. Moving between genres, ranging from gothic horror to English pastoral, from critical theory to Cold War noir, this riveting and voracious story-within-stories crescendos the turbulent voices of culture to an effect equally maddening and exalting.
