London and the South-East
A Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Never before published in the United States, the debut novel by the wildly talented author of Booker Prize Finalist All That Man Is
“That clattering noise you hear is the sound of critics and readers racing to find [David Szalay’s] earlier books, an activity worth the effort,” wrote Dwight Garner in his New York Times review of Szalay’s All That Man Is. And now American readers finally have their chance with his debut novel, London and the South-East.
Paul Rainey, the hapless antihero at the center of this “compulsively readable” (Independent on Sunday) story works, miserably, in ad sales. He sells space in magazines that hardly exist, and through a fog of booze and drugs dimly perceives that he is dissatisfied with his life—professionally, sexually, recreationally, the whole nine yards. If only there were something he could do about it—and “something” seems to fall into his lap when a meeting with an old friend and fellow salesman, Eddy Jaw, leads to the offer of a new job. But when that offer turns out to be as misleading as Paul’s own sales patter, his life is transformed in ways very much more peculiar than he ever thought possible.
London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, is both a gloriously told shaggy-dog story about the compromising inanities of office life and consumer culture, and the perfect introduction to one of the best writers at work today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This bleak, devastatingly observant novel from the Booker Prize finalist follows English ad salesman Paul Rainey. Stuck on an underperforming team at a dead-end sales firm, Paul is thrown a life raft by a former colleague, Eddy, who promises him a position at his own thriving sales company in exchange for a betrayal of Paul's current one. Paul goes to painstaking, embarrassing lengths to orchestrate this betrayal, recruiting his fellow salespeople to jump ship with him to Eddy's firm, but the plan backfires spectacularly on Paul, costing him his job, friends, and purpose. After he fails to secure employment as a gardener and then as a street sweeper, Paul's wife, Heather, finds him a job stocking shelves overnight at a supermarket. What minor confidence boost this affords Paul is swiftly eradicated by another betrayal, leading Paul to devise a revenge plan so ill-conceived that it circles around to profound. Written with intense psychological acuity and inventive detail, the author turns a humdrum account of male malaise into an experience far more affecting and universal than it has any right to be.
