Only Forward
-
-
4.7 • 6 Ratings
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Michael Marshall Smith’s surreal, groundbreaking, and award-winning debut which resonates with wild humour interlaced with dark recollections of an emotional minefield. Now part of the Voyager Classics collection.
May we introduce you to Stark.
Oh, and by the way — good luck.
Stark is the private investigator who goes to work when Something Happens to you. And when a Something happens it’s no good chanting ‘go away go away go away’ and cowering in a corner, because a Something always comes from your darkest past and won’t be beaten until you face it. And that’s not easy in a city where reality is twisting and broken, a world in which friends can become enemies in a heartbeat — and where your most secret fear can become a soul-shredding reality.
And the worst of it is, for this nightmare you don’t even have to be asleep…
Considered a modern classic, and consistently featured in lists of Books To Read Before Your Head Explodes, ONLY FORWARD is a novel you'll never forget.
Reviews
‘Smith delivers that rarest of commodities: a genuinely new twist with a punchline of CRYING GAME proportions’
Time Out
‘A storytelling skill that can only be described as pure genius’
Venue
‘Very funny and decidedly surreal’ Empire
‘No one writes better than Smith about love: how it’s won, how it’s lost. No one writes better about being wasted – by drugs, by drink, by time. Nigh-on unique.’ i-D
"Extraordinary debut" Clive Barker
About the author
Smith lives in north London with his wife Paula, and is currently working on screenplays and his next book, while providing two cats with somewhere warm and comfortable to sit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The dazzling pyrotechnics of British author Smith's last two future noir spectacles, Spares(under option to DreamWorks) and One of Us (under option to Warner Brothers), are prefigured in his promise-filled debut novel, a 1994 U.K. paperback original now seeing its first hardcover publication. Set in a stylized future City where individuals live in neighborhoods organically responsive to their moods and lifestyles, the story begins as a routine missing persons case for its narrator, Stark, an irreverent soft-boiled detective type who specializes in "finding people, or things." Stark's retrieval of Fell Alkland, a scientist who has fled the driven environment of Action Center for the placid Stable neighborhood, proves relativelyeasy. But pursuit by Action Center operatives and Alkland's crippling work-related nightmares force Stark and his quarry to escape to Jeamland, a collective repository of dreams and childhood memories that Stark appears to know very well, and to which, as he discovers only belatedly, he has been lured back deliberately. The genius of Smith's narrative is its casual revelation that the detective scenario and detailed elaborations of the City that pull the reader into the story are clue-filled set-ups for the real story of Stark's self-discovery in Jeamland. Ultimately, this requires chapters of explanatory exposition that slow down the finale and betray the awkwardness of a new writer growing into his skills. Nevertheless, the story blazes with a visionary intensity that fires its imagery and fuels its premise that "once you've gone forward, you can't go home again." FYI:Last year's mass market edition of this novel won the Philip K. Dick award for distinguished science fiction published as a paperback original in the U.S.
Customer Reviews
Stop reading the reviews; just go read the book. You can thank me later.
This is simply one of those rare mind-opening, jaw-dropping, works of literary, imaginative, and just plain old human genius that you only wish other books were like. Probably the best debut in the last 50 years, up there with David Mitchell's I-can't-even-see-left-field-from-where-this-book-takes-you early works.