The Bird Room

Reviews / Votes

Those who seek something unique in the contemporary British novel will delight in this adroit, snappy debut, a dark and beguiling meditation on the weight of being . . . A novel so fresh it practically pings with energy . . . Fizzes with deadpan wit and cutting one-liners. * * Independent * * 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. * * Guardian * * 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. * * 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. * * Metro * * 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 A strangely merry look at the agony of true love. * * Dazed and Confused * * 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 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