- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Flamingo; New Ed edition (20 April 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0006546048
- ISBN-13: 978-0006546047
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 993,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
‘Imagine Reservoir Dogs scripted by Alan Bennett and you will have some idea of the flavour… superbly realized.’
The Times
‘Remarkable… Signs of Life is a glorious hybrid, mixing elements of science fiction and literary art into a striking fable that reads like little else currently on bookshop shelves. His dystopian view of a Britain running riot with unregulated biotechnology is truly frightening.’
Sunday Times
‘Brilliantly sustained. If you’ve never discovered M. John Harrison, now’s your chance. Far too long the most underrated writer of his generation, he’s one of the best we’ve got.’
Time Out
‘Like all good literature, Harrison’s stories are worth reading again and again; the more you read, the more you understand.’
Iain Banks
Product Description
A dazzling modern fable of a woman who yearns to fly, from one of the most distinctive voices in modern British fiction – hailed in the Times Literary Supplement as ‘Grittier than Carey and wittier than McEwan’.
Mick Rose runs a fast – and sometimes illegal – courier service to the genetics industry. Money is plentiful, and life with his young lover Isobel Avens is all he ever wanted. But Isobel is dissatisfied. Beautiful, she wants to be more beautiful; earthbound, she dreams of flying. And when she takes a new DNA-based genetic treatment, Mick finds out more than he wants to know about Isobel – and the goods his firm has been carrying all these years.
M. John Harrison has been hailed as one of Britain’s most original novelists, viewing the modern world through sharp, unforgiving eyes. In Signs of Life he has created his most captivating novel yet, a dark, unsettling, heart-rending tale of a future that is nearly upon us and of dreams that will always be distant.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If I had the money I would put a copy of this book in every hotel room in the world. It is a book that contains such fine writing everyone should get a chance to read it.
John M Harrison is a writer at the top of his trade; his use of prose is sublime. Somehow he can convey in four or five words things most writers struggle to tell you in a whole paragraph.
The three main characters are as if written by Picasso bold confident outline with the details rendered minimally but the resulting portrait is more powerful than the most detailed word pictures.
The story is about life love rejection rebirth, I have read this book countless times and the emphasis of the story changes every time I read it.
This is a fine book.
John M Harrison is a writer at the top of his trade; his use of prose is sublime. Somehow he can convey in four or five words things most writers struggle to tell you in a whole paragraph.
The three main characters are as if written by Picasso bold confident outline with the details rendered minimally but the resulting portrait is more powerful than the most detailed word pictures.
The story is about life love rejection rebirth, I have read this book countless times and the emphasis of the story changes every time I read it.
This is a fine book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This extraordinary story weaves its way from genre to genre--romance, thriller, sf and horror novel--to tease out the dreams, feelings, failures and inner realities of the narrator and his friends. In the west we long ago lost the distinction between the words "dream" and "aspiration": M John Harrison uses the new biotechnology to show very clearly that the two words are not synonymous. If you like a book that delights in *being* a book; if you like a book that thinks; if you want to know what the novel is going to be like in the next millenium; if you'd like to see how it's possible to write a horror-sf-women's romance for men: read this.
Format:Paperback
Harrison draws his characters with the intensity and one-pointedness of Disney enamel; the lifedirt collected under fingernails and the fierce clarity of the last thing you punched. His plots wind like Mobius strips and build from prose engineered like a Brunel bridge. If you want to write well, put down your pen and read Harrison first.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Shades of Cornelius
The only stories to match Moorcock's in the Jerry Cornelius collection The New Nature of the Catastrophe are M. John Harrison's, written in the early 70s. Read more
Published on 5 May 2001
Chill, unsettling and rather too plausible
Slapdash irresponsible scientists, criminally negligent couriers, corruption, exploitation and cruelty - these are just the bits sticking up out of this murky water. Read more
Published on 23 Oct 2000 by Jason Mills
My best read this year vivid, engaging, frightening, superb
At last a book for adults, the auther has managed to write a tale that combines vivid descriptions and imaginative use of language, making an elegant stucture for the reader to... Read more
Published on 27 Aug 1999
Not for everybody.
Requires the reader to have a functioning imagination.
Published on 23 May 1999
What is this book about??
This is abook populated by people with dopey names (China? Choe?) with badly described life itineries. Read more
Published on 5 Mar 1999
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