If This is Home
Mark Wilkinson has three names. He left his own behind in the rainy north of England. American immigration knows him as Joe Novak. And at the Valhalla, the mysterious complex where he sells lofty ambition and dark desires, he goes by Mr Jones. Since he was eighteen, Mark has been running away. Running from his small town, his vanished mother, his broken father. But one night in Las Vegas, shocked by violence and ambushed by memories, he is propelled back to his real name and his real past. Back to Bethany Wilder: carnival queen, partner in dreams, and tragic ghost.
3.7 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
320 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
July 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1447217404 |
| Publisher |
Picador |
| |
Mark Wilkinson has three names. He left his own behind in the rainy north of England. American immigration knows him as Joe Novak. And at the Valhalla, the mysterious complex where he sells lofty ambition and dark desires, he goes by Mr Jones. Since he was eighteen, Mark has been running away. Running from his small town, his vanished mother, his broken father. But one night in Las Vegas, shocked by violence and ambushed by memories, he is propelled back to his real name and his real past. Back to Bethany Wilder: carnival queen, partner in dreams, and tragic ghost.
Ten Stories About Smoking by Stuart Evers.
Reviews
The Scotsman
Alan Massie
“It is a pleasure to come on the work of a young novelist which is so intelligent and perceptive, and so well-written and so well-constructed. It is often rash to predict a successful future for a writer on the evidence of a first novel because that novel may draw on a well of experience and imagination which is soon drained. But I should be astonished if Stuart Evers does not prove to be the real thing. Meanwhile, this first novel is a fine achievement, something to savour. When I had finished it, I went back and read it again, and it seemed even better second time round.”
23/06/2012
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The Observer
Ben East
“The pervading air is one of quiet melancholy and disappointment. And yet, despite even his protagonist admitting to himself that he is "a slightly bored observer", it's to Evers's great credit that If This is Home is so readable. In the end, that's because Wilkinson is such a familiar character, someone who follows his dreams only to find that, regretfully, life doesn't quite turns out the way it does in the movies. A quiet triumph.”
15/07/2012
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The Spectator
Ben Hamilton
“If This is Home begins as a chilly take on greed and ambition and gradually softens to become a more sentimental tragic romance. What’s surprising is that Evers manages to land every dramatic punch, with a final twist that has devastating implications. Some readers may prefer the teasing and austere SF-style set-up to the later emotional denouement, but this is a fresh and eccentric novel that isn’t afraid of attending to the broader pleasures.”
21/07/2012
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The Guardian
Alfred Hickling
“We have been somewhere very like this before. Among the Ten Stories About Smoking was a tale entitled "The Best Place in Town", in which a young man from the north-west of England finds himself in an enigmatic Las Vegas casino that does not appear in any guide books or maps. He encounters an embittered variety performer who once worked as a warm-up act for the magician Paul Daniels … If This Is Home confirms Evers as a distinctive talent, yet also shows evidence of a Paul Daniels-like willingness to repeat the same trick. You'll like it. Not a lot – but you'll like it.”
27/07/2012
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The Daily Mail
Amber Pearson
“Evers won universal acclaim last year for his collection of short stories, Ten Stories About Smoking, and there remains something of the short story about the two separate strands that make up this debut novel. It’s both assured and unsettling, although once Mark abandons America and returns to the more familiar ground of small town Cheshire, the novel loses some of its earlier intriguing atmosphere of trippy, edgy paranoia.”
28/06/2012
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The Times
Hugo Rifkind
“Evers knocks out enviably beautiful prose, and the humming, muffled, air-conditioned neverland of Las Vegas is conjured up with a captivating and woozy effect. Parts of Mark’s narrative are, indeed, fabricated, and there’s a big reveal on the horizon about just which parts. There are other parts, though, which you never quite know whether to trust or not. The slight frustration of If This Is Home is the way it leaves you unable to fathom how much of this is deliberate.”
23/06/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
David Annand
“Evers … revisit[s] themes that served him so well in his debut collection: the juxtaposition of small-town English life with the great American cities, haunting recollections of past trauma, the lassitude of our early thirties and the instability of memory. His writing style hasn’t changed much, either. It is similarly clean and elegant; his sentences are unadorned, downbeat and honest in their documentary style. But this continuity is also the novel’s weakness, I think. Again and again in his short stories Evers displays his Matisse-like economy when it comes to sketching characters: a line here, a couple of lines there, and before you know it, against the odds, something recognisably human emerges. The novel, however, requires more than this, more nuance, more shading, and too few of the characters in If This is Home have the depth that long-form fiction demands. ”
05/07/2012
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