Self Help [Hardcover]

Engrossing ...Docx's story has a pleasing vitality, and the strands of it set in St Petersburg are particularly compelling. This is a solid novel. --Daily Telegraph

Edward Docx may well be remembered for creating the Anglo-Russian family Novel.... I was genuinely amazed by the detail of Docx's St Petersburg its streets, canals, yards and back-street life. He does not just provide a realistic description of the city, but also allows the reader to experience it, with all its beauty and cruelty, similar to the style of Dostoevsky. All of Docx's St. Petersburg characters are believable, as are Gabriel's friends and acquaintances. --The Financial Times Magazine

Not since What a Carve Up! has there been such an absorbing indictment of the family. --Independent on Sunday

'Docx's ability to evoke the atmosphere of a city is almost
Dikensian...his talent for narrative is very fine indeed.'

'Doxc can place you within each heart-stopping moment, speed up
and slow down time from one sentence to the next.'

`From the beginning Docx's novel is uncompromisingly heartfelt.
What mostly saves it from being overblown is the intellectual ballast that
accompanies the emotional truth telling, and recognition that of equal
importance are complexly realised characters and a plot with solid
momentum.'

`Edward Docx may well be remembered for creating the Anglo-Russian
family Novel.... I was genuinely amazed by the detail of Docx's St
Petersburg - its streets, canals, yards and back-street life. He does not
just provide a realistic description of the city, but also allows the
reader to experience it, with all its beauty and cruelty, similar to the
style of Dostoevsky.'

'a very moving, yet often hilarious, tale of a brother and sister and the discoveries they make about their unusual Anglo-Russian family'

'Edward Doc's second novel sparkes with life..what a prose artist he is!'

An enthralling novel of family secrets, institutional lies, and the shadows of the old east-west order

He was relieved to be again among the Russians. Nothing to do with his head, or even his heart, but in his soul . . . Set between London and St. Petersburg, Self Help is the absorbing story of a family - half-English, half-Russian - with many secrets and a dark, disturbed history. Masha Glover returns home from exile, where she dies suddenly and alone. Her twins, Gabriel and Isabella, must come together and confront the contorted legacy of the past in the shape of their estranged, malevolent father, Nicholas, and the pitiless stranger, Arkady Artamenkov. Self Help is a beautifully written novel, alive with feeling, intelligence and dark humour, and always directly engaged with the modern world. In addressing the most elemental of contradictions – human nature and nurture; honesty and deception; what it means to live with integrity when so much is so easily discredited – it emerges as that rarest of discoveries: a truly gripping story.

Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize 2007

Edward Docx is thirty three and lives in London. Self Help is his second novel.