Kill Your Friends

Wonderfully nasty...Extraordinarily vicious, deeply cynical and thoroughly depraved, but it's also bed-wettingly funny... American Psycho meets Spinal Tap... except more evil, more shocking and much, much funnier

Scotsman

Kill Your Friends gladly hammers the final and needed nail into the coffin of self-serving and undignified spin that was "Cool Britannia". It exposes a world that seethes alongside us and in which we all collude but whose nasty little machinery is rarely glimpsed. The novel is furiously, filthily funny, and, I imagine, tragically true.

Niall Griffiths

A fine novella - as evocative as it is moving

Observer

A moving book that succeeds not just in vividly evoking its time and place but in distilling one young man's clichéd and minor destiny into something approaching tragedy

New York Times

A piece of writing that will be admired by anyone who's interested in the era that made our own and those who read it are unlikely to forget its cool, Updikean temperament

Andrew O’Hagan

A rollicking tale of record company excess...Hysterical...Niven worked in the UK music industry for 10 years and his insider knowledge pays off...This is truly an account of a lost era, a brilliant description of the last decadent blow-out.

Independent on Sunday

Absolutely riveting

Daily Express

An all-out assault, a withering, scabrous attack on every part of the filthy machine... Stelfox is a creation of unparalleled awfulness, chronically sexist, racist and everything else-ist. He is funny, too... You laugh though you know you shouldn't

Independent

An amazing piece of work - as powerful as it is ugly

Greil Marcus

Anyone working in or trying to get into the music industry should read this book. Niven grotesquely portrays the short term disposability of this world with a great eye for detail and a stockpile of hilarious insults. Throw in some murder and major brand obsession and you have an indie American Psycho.

James Brown

Brilliant. It made me ill with laughter. The filthiest, blackest, most shocking, most hilarious debut novel I've read in years

India Knight

Dark, twisted...and also laugh-out-loud funny

TNT Magazine

John Niven's Kill Your Friends might just be the most exciting British novel since Trainspotting...Although the tone - a mixture of breathtakingly black-hearted cynicism, hyperbolically dark comedy and liberal sprinklings of violence - will invite comparisons with American Psycho and Bright Lights Big City, Niven brings a uniquely vibrant tone to the page with take-no-prisoners language that manages to be equal parts comic and shocking.

Word Magazine

Magnificently eloquent...A vicious, black-hearted howl of a book... Cripplingly funny

The Times

Might well be the best British novel since Trainspotting

Word Magazine

Niven's insider knowledge, coupled with the kind of headlong, febrile prose that would have Hunter S. Thompson happily emptying both barrels into the sky, results in a novel that is cripplingly funny

The Times

Often stunning, dark and densely imagined...one man's elegy for a bygone age

LA Weekly

One of the evilest, most vicious, despicable characters ever. I couldn't put it down.

James Dean Bradfield, The Manic Street Preachers

The fickle music industry is ripe for satire and here former record-label man Niven creates a compelling and hilarious portrait.

Shortlist

The narrative drive is irresistible. Well done to Niven for a giving voice to the sleazy foot soldiers of rock and roll

Independent on Sunday