Engleby

Mike Engleby has a secret...

This is the story of Mike Engleby, a working-class boy who wins a place at an esteemed English university. But with the disappearance of Jennifer, the undergraduate Engleby admires from afar, the story turns into a mystery of gripping power. Sebastian Faulks's new novel is a bolt from the blue, unlike anything he has ever written before: contemporary, demotic, heart-wrenching - and funny, in the deepest shade of black.

Review: Like Human Traces, Engleby is distinguished by a remarkable intellectual energy: a narrative verve, technical mastery of the possibilities of the novel form and vivid sense of the tragic contingency of human life... The combination of serious purpose and playful execution is intensely exhilarating -- Jane Shilling * Sunday Telegraph *

Beautifully done... A portrait of one mind out of joint with its times, and eventually defeated by them... Witty, poignant, Engleby is as cold as a Fenland wind, as clever as a Cambridge don * The Times *

His most brilliant novel yet * Daily Telegraph *

Brilliant * Observer *

Engleby himself is the most vivid personality Faulks has yet devised... engagingly lucid and disarmingly funny... This novel is a significant departure for Faulks, and the new terrain suits him well * Guardian *