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  • Published: 3 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448130351
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

First Novel




First Novel is absolutely at the forefront of everything I’ve read in British fiction over the last couple of years.’ Jonathan Coe

Paul Kinder, a novelist with one forgotten book to his name, teaches creative writing in a university in the north-west of England.

Either he's researching his second, breakthrough novel, or he's killing time having sex in cars.

Either eternal life exists, or it doesn't.

Either you'll laugh, or you'll cry.

Or maybe both.

  • Published: 3 January 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448130351
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 304

About the author

Nicholas Royle

Nicholas Royle is the author of seven novels, including The Director's Cut and Antwerp, as well as two novellas and a short story collection, Mortality. Born in Manchester in 1963, he runs Nightjar Press, reviews fiction for the Independent, and is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Praise for First Novel

Ingeniously twisted… expertly draws us into the unpredictable labyrinth of the protagonist’s mind, and is seldom less than grimly compelling… Exerts a pleasingly icy grip

Trevor Lewis, Sunday Times

Hugely impressive and entertaining

Anthony Cummins, Sunday Telegraph

An intricate story with an unsettlingly noirish effect

Lucy Scholes, Observer

Dead clever and occasionally macabre… Intricately plotted, proper wince-inducing stuff… A cutting-edge, vital new British novel for now

Stuart Hammond, Dazed & Confused

If writing about creative writing is to risk a novel eating itself, we can be thankful that a writer of Royle’s skills put himself in charge of the banquet

Gerard Woodward, Guardian

Blurs fact and fiction with aplomb… Royle’s novel is a sharp portrait of a man going very wrong.

Ben Felsenburg, Metro

Extremely good.

John Burnside, The Times

This may be a tricksily metafictional novel but Royle hasn’t forgotten his readers.

Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail

Royle’s coup is to deliver the pithy sting of a good short story many times over the course of a whole novel.

Claire Lowdon, New Statesmen

I admired it so much and wanted to go back and see how it was all put together. His book absolutely enchanted me.

Jenn Ashworth, Independent

5 stars, gripping, innovative and fluent.

Bookmebookblog

Nicholas Royle has produced the holy grail: a literary page-turner. Although it’s published in January, I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make the short list of many a prize at the end of the year.

Bookmunch

A strange, unsettling brew that simply entertains at first before revealing darker and more dangerous depths as it progresses; a dark and delicious treat for lovers of literary fiction who like to have their grey cells tickled.

Justwilliamsluck

Only a man with prodigious talent, not to mention a capacity for multi-tasking, would even attempt a book of such monumental ambition… Far too good to be a debut. Which, of course, it isn’t.This is a novel that demands to be read more than once.

Gavin James Bower, Independent

This is a finely honed work of sophisticated gaming that flirts with truth; yet it never forgets that it's also a plot-driven fiction

Philip Womack, Daily Telegraph

Dazzling… Royle attended last year’s Man Booker Prize ceremony as editor of one of the shortlisted titles, Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse… I wouldn’t bet against Royle having to dry-clean the tux on his own account next time.

Anthony Cummins, Sunday Telegraph

I began by simply enjoying the novel and ended up being thrilled, horrified, disturbed. First Novel is absolutely at the forefront of everything I’ve read in British fiction over the last couple of years.

Jonathan Coe

Highly recommended… First Novel is a clever book, but as well as having brains it has guts: it begins slowly but soon acquires the characteristics of a thriller, and the ending is a revelation

Simon Baker, Spectator

A crafty puzzler that folds the Shipman murders into the tale of a no-mark writing tutor with a fetish for car sex under the Manchester flight path.

Anthony Cummins, Evening Standard

A vertiginous murder mystery with echoes of JG Ballard, David Lodge and Alain Robbe-Grillet

Sunday Telegraph

If writing about creative writing is to risk a novel eating itself, we can be thankful that a writer of Royle's skills put himself in charge of the banquet

Gerard Woodward, Guardian

A brilliant, eerie mix of campus meta-novel, whodunnit, failed-love story and existential contemplation

Peter J. Smith, Times Higher Education

This just might be the exceptional book which should be judged by its cover

Liam Heylin, Irish Examiner

An ingenious tale

Observer

Cleverly metafictional, humorously perverse, and impressively original

Courtney Garner, Yorker