'People who say there aren't any brilliant literary novels about contemporary England anymore have obviously never read this.' Irvine Welsh

A brilliantly imagined and unsettling novel from the award-winning author of Heliopolis and The Amnesia Clinic

Three solitary characters remember their shared past in a sprawling, derelict psychiatric hospital on the English coast: a turbulent summer in the aftermath of the hospital's closure that culminated in a shocking, life-altering accident. But the more each tries to comprehend the past, the more elusive it becomes. Wreaking is an intricate, labyrinthine novel about the opiate power of place, the fragility of sanity and the fickle nature of memory.

This stays with you; an eccentric wonder about a disaffected, dying man, living in an abandoned insane asylum and various sinister, satellite characters; it's one of the most lyrical, gorgeously descriptive English novels of recent years - bafflingly ignored by prize judges -- Alan Warner * The Week *
There can be no doubting the remarkable scope of this writer’s imagination, nor the skill of his prose. He has a genius for atmosphere... If Charles Dickens is one influence, Breaking Bad is surely another -- Cressida Connolly * Spectator *
A gripping exploration of mental illness… A compelling update of a Gothic novel… The real pleasure of this book is Mr Scudamore’s masterly and unflinching prose * The Economist *
A quietly remarkable novel that resonates with universality * Literary Review *
Wreaking itself is drawn brilliantly with both precise and pungent descriptions… The descriptions of teenage boredom by the sea and adult ennui in the city are stingingly realised… Sharply hewn, inventively structured and unnervingly written -- Stuart Evers * Observer *
A self-conscious and self-reflexive novel. It is the building itself that looms largest… And though, like Thornfield and Manderley, we find Wreaking broken by time, weather and debt, it commands our attention * Times Literary Supplement *
A creepy chronicle of abuse, abandonment and unrequited love… So much here is brilliant * Metro *
Everything we most want to know, the author quietly looks away from, until the story becomes as layered, contorted and interrupted as the collapsing architecture of Wreaking itself. Then time straightens out and speeds up suddenly… Everything connects. Everything comes to light. Everything is revealed, yet somehow the buckling of time induced by subjectivity, madness and metaphor makes it all just as hard to see -- M. John Harrison * Guardian *
The question of what constitutes madness... is intelligently explored. Bold, grotesque, bawdy...memorable * Independent On Sunday *
Relentlessly inventive * Sunday Telegraph *

James Scudamore is the author of the novels Wreaking, Heliopolis, and The Amnesia Clinic. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and been nominated for the Costa First Novel Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Man Booker Prize.

www.jamesscudamore.com