Matthew Adams

Dissing Diston

Lionel Asbo: State of England

By

Jonathan Cape 276pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

Deep in the opening section of this rich and remarkable novel, the young Desmond Pepperdine – ‘repeatedly amazed by the total tonnage of what he didn’t know’, and by this stage the adult beneficiary of those adolescent ‘pangs and quickenings of intelligence within his being’ – speaks the following words: ‘It’s like a fairy tale. Magic.’

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • . is next week! The programme is excellent and there are free copies of Literary Review, to boot! ,
    • 'Britain's spy chief in the Congo replied to a fellow peer who asked her whether SIS played any part in its prime m… ,
    • This month Lucy Popescu covers the plight of poet Galal El-Behairy and activist Wael Abbas in Egypt's crack-down on… ,
    • 'I fear that defending an 18th-century agrarian economist against – well, against whom exactly? – is not the best u… ,
    • 'He lacks empathy with all but the wealthy and has no grasp of the struggles faced by the majority of his concitoye… ,
    • Here's Richard Vinen's review of A Certain Idea of France by Julian Jackson: ,
    • RT : James Crabtree's 'Billionaire Raj' - my review for . "...For sheer chutzpah, India’s billionaires provid… ,
    Follow Us