
The Bird Room
Chris Killen(Author)
Canongate Books (Publisher)
Published on 22. January 2009
Book
Paperback/Softback
208 pages
978-1-84767-260-5 (ISBN)
Description
When a boy named Will meets Alice, he can't believe his luck. She's smart, sexy and, much to Will's surprise, in love with him. Alice brings meaning to his urban existence and his McJob. But the course of modern love did never run smooth and soon devotion leads Will to something darker.
Elsewhere in the city Helen is an actress. Or she will be one day. For now she finds work as a model. She used to be called Clair, but she wants to be something new and she can be anyone. She's an actress, remember.
A love story with a twist, this explosive debut novel brings Will and Helen's lives together in a tale as tight as rope and as black as tar. The Bird Room is a candid, funny, intimate portrait of a generation.
Elsewhere in the city Helen is an actress. Or she will be one day. For now she finds work as a model. She used to be called Clair, but she wants to be something new and she can be anyone. She's an actress, remember.
A love story with a twist, this explosive debut novel brings Will and Helen's lives together in a tale as tight as rope and as black as tar. The Bird Room is a candid, funny, intimate portrait of a generation.
Reviews / Votes
The Bird Room is an astonishingly good first novel. I was gripped from the first page. -- M.J.HYLAND An extremely engaging combo of sex, melancholy and killer one-liners - The Bird Room is a beautiful Chinese puzzle of a novel. -- TOBY LITT Chris Killen's first novel is either disturbingly brilliant or brilliantly disturbing. Whichever, I loved it. -- STEVEN HALL The Bird Room is amazing. Beautiful, laconic and chockablock with uneasy sex - like having a threesome with your girlfriend and Richard Brautigan. -- RICHARD MILWARD A strangely merry look at the agony of true love. * * Dazed and Confused * * As fresh and honest a take on twenty-first century relationships as you are likely to find. I was knocked out by the cold, translucent beauty of Killen's prose. -- MATT HAIG Killen has taken a rough stone and polished it into a gem. A book that succeeds in turning daily banality into a thing of great beauty. I loved it. -- EWAN MORRISON Killen creates a cast of unlikeable and morally dubious characters yet still makes his book compelling. There are also flashes of linguistic brilliance which suggest greater things to come from the 27-year-old writer. -- Melissa McClements * * Financial Times * * A darkly stylish comedy of sexual manners . . . Killen evokes a grimy world of sexual tension with unerring, uncomfortable accuracy . . . Much of The Bird Room's appeal is down to Killen's taut, sharp prose style - not flashy but alternately laconic, melancholy and dryly witty - that gives an edgy, sometimes creepy and very contemporary sense of beauty to the everyday and the banal. -- Tina Jackson * * Metro * * The Bird Room is a hall of mirrors . . . sparely written, cool, jaunty, darkly comic, with a sharp ear for voice and manner . . . it displays exuberant brio. -- Steve Davies * * Guardian * * A simple enough story . . . but Killen creates something memorable out of his everyday ingredients. Clever time shifts keep the reader on their toes, there are many darkly funny observations about contemporary urban life and his spare, powerful prose brilliantly captures the loneliness of cities and the agonies of love. -- Lottie Moggach * * London Paper * *More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-trade)
Dimensions
Height: 214 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
224 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-84767-260-5 (9781847672605)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Chris Killen was born in 1981. He currently lives in Manchester. The Bird Room is his first novel.