Thursday, February 9, 2017

David Peace's New Novel

Is David Peace the best novelist in England? Yes. Yes he is. That is if he still lives in England. Sources are conflicting about that. Some people say he lives in rural Yorkshire with his Japanese wife and family (God help them) other sources say he lives in Japan. In either case he's still the most exciting contemporary English (very English in fact) novelist whose books are at the forefront of a completely new way of telling stories. Experimental, dark, weird (but not like, you know, Tim Burton weird - proper weird, weird) Peace is an inheritor of JG Ballard's trick of examining society through an exploration of psychology; but Peace, of course, looks backward into the disturbing near past not into the disturbing near future...
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Anyway, I like David Peace and it was with some small measure of excitement that I noticed this amazon.co.uk listing. Faber are not saying what this is but someone on twitter told me it might be a book about MI5 and Harold Wilson. Sounds intriguing but actually it doesn't matter what its going to be about, it's a new David Peace novel and that is cause for celebration.