Lurid & Cute (eBook)

This yarn takes place in the suburbs of a giant city. In Brasilia they're coming off their night shift, in Tokyo they're having their first whisky sours – that's what's happening elsewhere in the world when our hero wakes up. Together with his wife and dog, he lives at home with his parents. He has had the good education and, until recently, the good job. In other words, the juggernaut of meaning was not parked heavily on our hero's lawn.

But then the lurid overtakes him – and whether this lurid tone is caused by our hero's new unemployment, or his feelings for a girl who is not his wife, or the return of his old friend Hiro, it's hard to say. What's definite is that a chain of events begins that feels to those inside it, narcotic and neurotic, like one long and terrible descent – complete with lies, deciet, and chicanery, one orgy, one brothel, and a series of firearms disputes.

While if you start to notice minute doubles and repeats, or wonder if what you took as some trick of perspective might in fact be a kink of reality, perhaps that shouldn't be so much of a surprise... For very possibly this suburban noir as the story of a woebegone and global generation – and our hero, the sweetest narrator in world literature, may well also be the most fearsome.

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'I had this vision very clearly of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute. In this way the hero of Adam Thirlwell s new novel describes the book you hold between your hands: a delirious tale of backchat and low tricks, all of which begin when our hero wakes beside a woman who is bleeding, unconscious and not, unfortunately, his wife... And then, of course, events get very much worse.SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2015WINNER OF THE E.M. FORSTER AWARD 2015