From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Synopses & Reviews
A daring, brilliant new novel from Man Booker Prize finalist Steve Toltz, for fans of Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace: a fearlessly funny, outrageously inventive dark comedy about two lifelong friends.
Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship.
With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world — including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award — Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse. Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.
Review
"Quicksand crackles with such intensity it made me turn the pages
with a harder snap, lean closer, want to gnaw the words. This is a
novel of sneak-attack seriousness, so funny it fools you into letting
down your guard—then knocks you upside the head with intense
intelligence, probing thought, raw pain. For all the wit and wisdom in
this book, all the pleasures contained in its raucous, furious, fearless
pursuit of truths, the greatest thrill comes when it strikes you that
you’ve never read anything quite like it before, that you just might
have stumbled—startlingly, unsettlingly—on something close to genius in
the writing of Steve Toltz." Josh Weil, author of The Great Glass Sea
Review
“The energy, the hairpin turns, the narrative crashes, the stomach
churning ascents and trashed taboos: what a joy to surrender oneself to a
writer of such prodigious talent.” Peter Carey, Booker Prize-winning author of Amnesia
Review
"Steve Toltz writes with a singular, propulsive energy, with sentences
and characters that rise off the page with a force that leaves you
almost breathless. There is more heart, and joy and compassion and
hard-earned wisdom in Quicksand than seems possible for a single novel;
it is life, literature at its fullest.” Dinaw Mengestu, award-winning
author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and All Our Names
About the Author
Steve Toltz's first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, was released in 2008 to widespread critical acclaim, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award. Prior to his literary career, he lived in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Barcelona, and Paris, variously working as a cameraman, telemarketer, security guard, private investigator, English teacher, and screenwriter. Born in Sydney, he currently lives in New York.