Wreaking - James Scudamore

9780099523857

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Title
Wreaking
Author
James Scudamore
format
Paperback / softback
Publisher
Vintage Books
Language
English
UK Publication Date
20140724

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.

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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

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
The Week - Alan Warner

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
Spectator - Cressida Connolly

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
Observer - Stuart Evers

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
Guardian - M. John Harrison

The question of what constitutes madness... is intelligently explored. Bold, grotesque, bawdy...memorable
Independent On Sunday

Relentlessly inventive
Sunday Telegraph

Intensely imagined
Sunday Times

Settings don't come much more Gothic than Wreaking, the derelict, decaying...psychiatric hospital of James Scudamore's striking third novel
Daily Mail

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 Love This Book

We are left with the characters in our heads for days, and the sense of unease that Scudamore cleverly conjures up
Press Association Syndication

A twisted, unsettling tale of family lies and lonely souls
Shortlist

Type
BOOK
Edition
1st paperback ed
Country of Publication
England
Number of Pages
389

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