When you buy a used copy YOU SAVE
Carbon Dioxide
0.83Kg of CO2
Water
104 litre(s) of Water
Tree
0.0062 Tree(s)
donate
1 book donated to global literacy projects

Seven Lies

3.21 ( 264 Ratings by Goodreads)
Seven Lies

Seven Lies

(Author)
3.21 (264 Ratings by Goodreads)
hardback
Published: 9 February, 2006
Standard worldwide delivery by Tue, July 14 - Fri, July 17
Order within 0
Condition: USED
$8.99
RRP $19.85
You save $10.86 (55%)
Price includes shipping
Available 1 in stock
- +
FREE Returns within 30 days

Description

Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, Seven Lies tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young man growing up in the former East Germany, whose yearnings for love, glory and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. The hopeless son of an ambitious mother and a kind but unlucky diplomat, Stefan lurches between his budding, covert interests - girls and Romantic poetry - to find himself embroiled in dissident politics, which oddly seems to offer both. In time, by a series of blackly comic and increasingly dangerous manoeuvres, he contrives to make his fantasy come true, finding himself not only in the country of his dreams, but also married to the woman he idolises. America seems everything he expected, and meanwhile his secrets are safely locked away behind the Berlin Wall. A new life of unbounded bliss seems to have been granted to him. And then that life begins to fall apart...Exquisitely written and brilliantly imagined, James Lasdun's second novel is a terrifying plummet into anxiety, as complacency yields to an edgy paranoia. Pitching the furtive, shabby world of Communist Berlin against the glassy superficiality of contemporary New York, Seven Lies is an examination of the architecture of deceit - how deceit builds on itself until life is little more than an accretion of falsehood; how hope turns to fear, and dreams to nightmares.
See more

More Details

Type Book
ISBN13 9780224075923
ISBN10 0224075926
Number Of Pages 208
Item Weight 321 g
Product Dimensions 144 x 26 x 216 mm
Publisher / Reseller Jonathan Cape Ltd
Format hardback
See More +

Media Reviews

James Lasdun is a tremendous writer and Seven Lies is that rare thing, a novel that delivers on every level. It is so gripping that you want to gobble it down at a single sitting, and yet the prose is so exacting that you want to linger over every sentence Geoff Dyer The imaginativeness with which he explores the politics of expectation and failure runs deep... Seven Lies combines the knuckle-whitening tension of a thriller with literary wit and the precision of a surgeon seeking to tease out rotten flesh. Definitely a novel to be admired Economist A brilliant and darkly funny tale of politics and paranoia -- Christina Patterson Independent Lasdun's second novel has much of the thriller about it. But its more sinuous power comes from other duplicities in Stefan's previous life: a glorious section of the book involves his teenage self plagiarising Walt Whitman to impress his mother's salon, all the while bribing a pederast janitor with aquavit to gain access to the source material -- Alex Clark Observer Seven Lies...has a way of enlarging the spirit and refreshing the mind far more comprehensively than many books with twice its 200 pages -- James Buchan Guardian

Show more

GoodReads Reviews

Author's Bio

James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in upstate New York. He has published two collections of short stories, three books of poetry and a novel, The Horned Man. His story 'The Siege' was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his film Beseiged. He co-wrote the screenplay for the film Sunday (based on another of his stories) which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, 1997. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, and currently teaches poetry and fiction workshops at Princeton.

Show more