Following on from his acclaimed novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and The Red House, Mark Haddon is back with a brand new story. Love London Love Culture rounds up the reviews….
The Guardian: “Haddon teams the novel’s dreaminess with electrically lucid action: shipwrecks, nick-of-time escapes and combat scenes that would give Lee Child a run for his money. He can be grisly when he wants to but he’s no gore-monger, in one case achieving his effects by refraining from describing a pivotal fight, suddenly muting the volume.”
The Independent: **** “Haddon’s glittering tapestry of a novel skilfully redeploys the structures of Pericles’ source material.”
Evening Standard: “Haddon’s prose is beautiful, and he is utterly in command of his slippery material. Recurring motifs and emotional reverberations are neatly threaded through, while further tales from literature and myth prove a richly animating force.”
Irish Times: “Were Haddon a female writer, The Porpoise might have been marketed as a feminist retelling of Pericles. As it is, the tale is all the more complex and chilling for his broaching of this subject. He ventures into dangerous lands.”
The Telegraph: ***** “The Porpoise is a defiantly odd novel, dependent on the fine caul of Haddon’s prose to keep together the heavily spiced romantic mixture within. But it works.”
Kirkus Reviews: “The nature of narrative itself would seem to be the focus here in a novel that challenges readers to connect the multidimensional dots.”
The Times: “Shakespeare inspires a pyschosexual horror story”
The FT: “This story of King Antiochus and his daughter is given emotional and psychological plausibility in a modern setting.”
The Porpoise is available to buy now.