- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Gollancz (10 Jan 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0575082143
- ISBN-13: 978-0575082144
- Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 209,895 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Somnambulist (GollanczF.)
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"This promising debut subverts its 19th-century predecessors amusingly. Inventive and often witty. A cabinet crammed with curiosities." (Sarah Crowden THE OBSERVER )
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
'Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it.' So starts the extraordinary tale of Edward Moon, detective, his silent sidekick the Sonambulist and devilish plot to recreate the apocalyptic prophecies of William Blake and bring the British Empire crashing down. With a gallery of vividly grotesque characters, a richly evoked setting and a playful highly literate style this is an amazingly readable literary fantasy and a brilliant debut.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A really good adventure!,
This review is from: The Somnambulist (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
This was a really entertaining read. If you liked Mark Gatiss The Vesuvuis Club then you'll love this. It references alot of english victorian writing such as dickens and Doyle. It is hilariously dark in humour. I found the prose well written and easy to read even though the story is complex. It is atmospheric to say the least. It is very much a book aimed at people with a sense of the ridiculous. This book doesn't take it's self too seriously and therefore you enjoy it all the more. A great read!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tinketty-Tonk...,
By The Big Onion (london) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Somnambulist (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
It's the kind of book that may have been written if Lewis Carrol, Robert Rankin and Conan Doyle had somehow all gotten together and taken some very illegal substances while writing the script to a Hammer production of the early 1970s.Full of grotesque characters and places, this is a brilliant hamming up of Victorian London, that follows its own twisted logic, with an equally twisted narrator and some very, very peculiar touches. It is carried off brilliantly, with a pacy plot and a nice dark chuckle at very regular intervals. It manages to walk the line between unpleasantness and humour with skill, and I am really hoping that Mr Barnes' second novel will be at least as good.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Victorian Farce A Right Old Jolly Jape!,
By
This review is from: The Somnambulist (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
First things first - this book IS different.Secondly, I thoroughly enjoyed this dastardly Dickensian thriller, and especially the characters. Edward Moon, the conjuror/detective and his silent partner, The Somnambulist, were terrific players in this Victorian farce, and should be the subject of further books, I believe. Other characters too stood out and made this a book I wanted to get back to pretty smartish, in case the characters somehow disappeasred from the pages whilst I was gone. The only let-down, noted I see by another critic here, was the silly ending to it all - but the characters just carried it through. Not so much a silly ending more a SOPPY plot in the first place. But, hey, a bit of tongue-in-cheek doesn't do any of us any harm, does it? Go on. read it, and see if you agree with me - those two characters should be in a series of books.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
