This is a brilliant book: disturbing, amusing, thought-provoking, playful, real, unreal. All the usual Faulks intelligence and enjoyment of language is here.
Yet Engleby is different from his other books. This time, you get the feeling Faulks has let you into his own life: school, university, Notting Hill, journalism (the interviews with Jeffrey Archer and Ken Livingstone just can’t have been made up).
There is a catharsis here – and, despite the disturbances in Mike Engleby’s brain, you can feel Faulks really enjoying his writing, making this book perhaps more approachable than some of his other subjects.
It is an absolute travesty that Sebastian Faulks has never won a major British Book Award, especially as Birdsong is generally recognised as one of the greatest novels in contemporary fiction. Hopefully, Mike Engleby will do it for him (he doesn’t do much for anyone else).
Time is one of the themes running through Engleby. Make sure you take time to read it.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Recommendations: |
