by Toby Litt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2001
Violent, fast, mean, funny, and thoroughly satisfying.
Dinner with his gorgeous ex-girlfriend in an of-the-moment restaurant is made epically memorable for a London screenwriter when an executioner pops in and wipes out the date—and nearly finishes off the writer, who, badly banged-up, carries an understandable grudge.
It was Lily who made the date with Conrad Redman. Lovely Lily. Lily the almost-actress. Lily the star of the adverts. Who six weeks ago kicked Conrad out of her life and her excellent apartment. And here she’s cocked her finger for Conrad to fill in at dinner when she’s stood up by her first choice. And Conrad, who still carries a torch, comes running. No shame. And precious little money for the very expensive dinner just ordered that won’t be enjoyed, thank you, because a gent in cyclist-delivery spandex has walked in and sprayed Lily dead with an automatic pistol, and got several rounds into Conrad, who wakes up weeks later to find himself in rehab with a lot of questions. And some money. It turns out Lily hadn’t got around to changing her will, so Conrad’s got her savings and that very desirable apartment. As he rebuilds his badly wasted body, Conrad learns that the gunman is in custody, but that nobody—not his mother, not his long-suffering social worker, not Lily’s unspeakable parents, and absolutely nobody official—will tell him anything about the assassin or the circumstances that so rudely interrupted Lily and Conrad’s last supper. As curious as he is irritated, Conrad goes digging. His wheelchair-and-taxi odyssey, shadowed by all sorts of heavies, will take him into a pathology lab, the city’s theatrical and underworlds, and (most frightening) the world of the tabloids, and will nearly get him killed all over again. He will learn that Lily was pregnant and that he was not the only one enjoying her favors when he was still enjoying them. Some of the most satisfying moments in Conrad’s battle for the truth occur when the Royal Shakespeare Company takes heavy blows.
Violent, fast, mean, funny, and thoroughly satisfying.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7145-3068-9
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Michael Crichton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 1990
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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