Soft!
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Former bouncer Barker Dodds wants nothing more than to flee his violent past in his native Plymouth for an uncertain new existence as a barber in London's colorful East End. Waif-like Glade Spencer drifts through life as a waitress at a fashionable Soho restaurant, a devoted daughter to her estranged, caravan-dwelling father, and a long-distance girlfriend to an unpredictable American lawyer. And ambitious soft drink branch manager Jimmy Lyle is eager to please his new American boss with a revolutionary marketing strategy for Soft!, one that promises to make the new orange-colored beverage a soda sensation for the twenty-first century.
It is under that effervescent orange glow that these three disparate souls intersect, as each learns "there is nothing soft about the soft drink industry." When unsuspecting "Soft! ambassador" Glade begins to unravel from her subconscious obsession with a product she's never tried, Jimmy's top-secret campaign threatens to spill into the daily papers, and Barker once again finds himself employed as a thug-for-hire. At turns harrowing and darkly humorous, Soft! is a magnificently surreal story, one that New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani calls "Rupert Thomson's most powerful novel yet."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomson (Air and Fire; The Five Gates of Hell) is a hugely talented but hard-to-classify British writer whose books so far have had little in common beyond their soaring imagination and startling vividness of style. Soft!, which is at once a literary thriller of dazzling velocity and a portrait of contemporary London that invites comparison with the best work of Martin Amis, should win him a much wider readership. There are three principal characters. Barker Dodds, a big, rough man who has worked as a bouncer, leaves provincial Plymouth because the family of a local man thinks Barker killed him; he goes to London to try for a new life, only to find he can't escape a violent past. Glade Spencer is an attractive young waitress with an unpredictable American boyfriend who occasionally sends her airline tickets to visit him, but who otherwise seems to be waiting for something to happen. Jimmy is an upwardly mobile young executive at an American-owned soft-drinks company that is about to introduce a new product to the British market; he has a bright--but ultimately dangerous--idea to promote it, designed to impress a fearsome American boss. As these three lives improbably interact, Thomson tells a tale that is at once a scary study of consumer culture, a riveting crime story and a novel in which London itself--its weather, its passers-by, its rooms and its Tube stops--becomes a contributing character portrayed with a dark poetry. Thomson has created dozens of unforgettable cameos to bring his people to life: Barker's earlier girlfriends; Glade's dazzlingly surreal trips to Miami and New Orleans, her sad visits to her bewildered, abandoned father in a caravan in a remote Lancashire field; Jimmy's anxious flirtations. It is rare to find a book of such headlong readability that is also studded with memorable images of people and places.
