Lasdun's style is a bit Nabakov (with fewer verbal games) and a bit Ishiguro (but less obscure). The tale is absorbing. Highly recommended. ( )

This was one of those books that I just didn't want to put down. It caught my attention, drew me in, and was snared in its trap. I've never read anything like it--strange in a new way. Will definitely reread this one . ( )

This is a strange and difficult book, which enraptured me and alienated me by turns. The narrator is unreliable from the start and the game is to piece together what is really happening as he lurches from disaster to disaster, subject to paranoia and moments of hallucinatory dread.
Lawrence is a lecturer at a small New York college with a seat on the Sexual Harassment Committee and an uneasy relationship with many of his colleagues. His wife has left him and he may or may not have made advances to another colleague and/or a student who keeps leaving him essays which he never reads. The action moves between his apartment, the college and his department office, a room he inherited from a female lecturer who has been murdered. He suspects another colleague – sacked in disgrace for sleeping with students - of haunting his life, even sleeping in his office, and lying in wait for him. If that isn’t complicated enough, throw in a disappearing murder weapon, the theft of a neighbour’s glass eye, a hostile relationship with his analyst, a period of cross-dressing in the clothes of his murdered predecessor, and a nightmare penchant for migraines – and you have one of the weirdest and most engrossing mysteries I for one have ever come across.
Written in beautifully concise and lucid prose (Lasdun is a well-established poet), nevertheless the reader cannot expect any neatly tied plot lines or satisfactory arrests. This is a condition of life novel, not a murder mystery, more Kafka than Chandler. Moving, funny, violent and – in the end – terrifying, this book is quite unlike anything I have ever read before. ( )

A truly excellent novel! I could not put this book down, starting from 9 pm until about midnight when I finished. Would I recommend it? Definitely, but not to everyone. If you're looking for something along the lines of cut and dried plot with everything explained to you & tidied up at the end, you're not going to like this book. I went to sleep thinking about it & woke up the same. Very chilling & eerie novel; not so much a "thriller" as I've seen it advertised but rather a study of the psychosis of paranoia & the loss of control in an alien environment.

The main character is Lawrence Miller, a British ex-pat who teaches gender studies at a college in New York City. He is also a member of the sexual harassment committee at the college, and has replaced a professor who we learn has been murdered. In his personal life, Miller is separated from his wife, Carol, and is seeing a therapist so as to deal with Carol's absence. Sounds okay so far, yeah? Well, here's where it gets interesting. One day while in his office, he takes out a book & realizes that the bookmark has moved and that he has lost his place. Then, during one of the sexual harassment committee meetings, where they are discussing what to do about a certain professor who is currently the target of allegations, another name comes up: Bogomil Trumilcik, another professor who was said to have gone crazy & disappeared after being brought up on sexual harassment charges before the committee. He was a womanizer, making advances supposedly to every woman with whom he came into contact. Miller becomes fascinated with Trumilcik, and begins to suspect that Trumilcik is the person behind things being moved or disappearing from his office. Miller becomes so obsessed with Trumilcik that he begins to perceive that Trumilcik is ruining his life.

The true meat of this story is Miller's paranoia and obsessions in the midst of (or as the result of?) being in a place in which he feels different and alien. You have to judge for yourself what is really going on in this book.

An excellent work and I know that at somepoint I'm going to go back to it, because it really needs a second reading. ( )