- Published: 1 August 2012
- ISBN: 9780099555469
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 384
- RRP: $29.99
The Blue Book
- Published: 1 August 2012
- ISBN: 9780099555469
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 384
- RRP: $29.99
AL Kennedy is almost unique among British novelists for her ability to write fiction that is at once challengingly experimental, luminously beautiful and utterly readable. It helps that she is fiercely observant and very funny... If you want a guide to the rough contradictions of the heart, AL Kennedy is your woman
Jane Shilling, Evening Standard
It displays all the verbal artistry and emotional force of its predecessor, burrowing deep into the minds of its intense central characters
Amber Pearson, Daily Mail
Offers the pleasures of a work in which form and content dovetail with extraordinary skill, and in which narrative tricks are utilised to enlarge on the theme of deception rather than for the sake of tricksiness itself
Edmund Gordon, Sunday Times
An amazing conception, one that will make you want to turn back and start again the moment you have finished... the writing is as taught and thrilling as Kennedy's prose always is and there is her usual wry laughter chuckling within it all
Joan Bakewell, New Statesman
The more mysterious elements of the novel's structure...make the book a giddy pleasure
Anthony Cummins, Literary Review
An impressive novel
Keith Miller, Daily Telegraph
If you like Kennedy's work, with its cool wit, spare stylishness, sharp sense of place and world-worn tenderness, then you'll find all those attributes here
Keith Miller, Independent on Sunday
Always a bold writer, she observes the world with a refreshingly skewed intelligence, and her well-known darkness, sometimes verging on morbidity, is always leavened with wit and humour. She also writes beautifully
Guardian
Kennedy is a fine stylist and single passages are exquisite
Financial Times
This is a masterful novel, imaginatively crafted, shaped by big, precisely articulated emotion
The Times
This woman is a profound writer
Richard Ford
Kennedy is as disconcertingly accurate at tenderness as at wildness... A passionate writer, on the edge and at risk
New York Times Book Review
Kennedy writes with flaying precision about the things we won't often admit to ourselves, let alone speak aloud
Daily Mail
A virtuoso of prose. Her phrasing is fine-tuned and supple to the highest degree: intuitive and subtle about the multifarious sensations of being alive
London Review of Books
One of the most brilliant writers of her generation.
Sunday Telegraph
Kennedy's sixth novel might move by turns through mystery, love story and comedy of shipboard manners, but its central subject is the transgressive, near-sexual pleasure of passing off fiction as fact
New Statesman
An amazing conception, one that will make you want to turn back and start again the moment you have finished...the writing is as taut and thrilling as Kennedy's prose always is and there is her usual wry laughter chuckling within it all
Joan Bakewell, New Statesman, Books of the Year
Complex and complicated in the very best way
Erica Wagner, The Times, Books of the Year
She observes the world with a refreshingly skewed intelligence, and her well-known darkness is always leavened with wit and humour
Carol Birch, Guardian
A tricksy, dazzlingly playful novel from this exhilarating Scottish author
Metro
The story takes on a dual purpose, questioning the reader’s appreciation of what is truth and what is deception
Big Issue
Beth’s compulsive self-examination makes this novel as hard to turn away from as it is unsettling to read
Herald
It may take a while to find your land-legs after reading Kennedy, but the trip will have been well worth the effort
Independent
A stylistically experimental writer, Kennedy reveals the inner workings of those who peddle stories for a living
Emma Hagestadt, Independent and i