Wreaking

A brilliantly dark and unsettling novel from the author of the Booker longlisted Heliopolis and one of the UK's most talented young writers. Perilously ill, Jasper Scriven spends his days roaming the wards of a derelict psychiatric hospital on England’s southeast coast. His daughter Cleo works in London as a news editor, making palatable stories of the world's events and trying to stay one step ahead of her demons. Meanwhile, she is watched by Roland, a hulking, silent figure who inhabits a network of railway arches, emerging at night to pound the streets and burgle homes to order. These three solitary characters are connected by an accident that took place at the hospital in the aftermath of its closure – an event that defies understanding even as it continues to define them. Their attempts to negotiate the past will bring them together again and force them to revisit their actions, however uncomfortable that may be. In this brilliantly imagined and disturbing novel, James Scudamore explores the fallibility of memory, the notion of madness and the way events resound in both people and places. www.wreaking.co.uk

About the Author :
James Scudamore is the author of two previous novels. His first, The Amnesia Clinic, won the 2007 Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for four other prizes, including the Costa First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. His second, Heliopolis, was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. He has held two fellowships at the University of East Anglia, and is on the MFA faculty of City University Hong Kong. www.jamesscudamore.com

Review :
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 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 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 A quietly remarkable novel that resonates with universality 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 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 A creepy chronicle of abuse, abandonment and unrequited love… So much here is brilliant 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 The question of what constitutes madness... is intelligently explored. Bold, grotesque, bawdy...memorable Relentlessly inventive Intensely imagined Settings don’t come much more Gothic than Wreaking, the derelict, decaying...psychiatric hospital of James Scudamore’s striking third novel This is the work of a writer totally at ease with, and confident in, his powers. A wonderfully assured novel with scope and ambition and with enough of a mystery at its heart to keep the reader hooked till the end We are left with the characters in our heads for days, and the sense of unease that Scudamore cleverly conjures up A twisted, unsettling tale of family lies and lonely souls An immersion in the physical and psychic ruins of a contemporary Britain which enchants and disturbs, lures and repels. The inner poetry and descriptive mastery of James Scudamore's Wreaking are riches which cannot be forgotten. If you only read one novel in coming times, make it this astonishing and deeply moving chronicle This is an impressive work from the critically acclaimed author of Heliopolis