Familiar

Reviews / Votes

J. Robert Lennon's beautifully written new novel bristles with menace and suspense - a terrific and disturbing read * Daily Mail * This highly convincing nightmare reads like a thriller; Lennon is painfully truthful about grief and parenthood -- Kate Saunders * Times * Tight in focus as well as in construction...an otherworldly narrative -- Leo Robson * Evening Standard * Dazzling -- Justine Jordan * Guardian * A writer with enough electricity to light up the country -- Ann Patchett A literary puzzle, a marvelous trick of the mind...as tightly wound as a great Alfred Hitchcock movie. * LA Times * So breakneck and harrowing, so grab-you-by-the-lapels astonishing, that you may not notice until nearly the end how many questions about your own life it makes you ask. -- Elizabeth McCracken A novel that imposes itself on the imagination from the opening sentences ... Lennon's brisk prose is both vivid and precise; the dialogue is clear and authentic, often funny. In fact, considering that this is a deadly serious, often bewildering and affecting novel, Familiar is witty and satiric. It is obvious that its genius lies in Lennon's feel for metaphysical contradictions that consistently undercut the realism ... a similar approach to the theme of parallel universes and altered experiences within shifting time frames has also been explored in novels such as Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 or Tom McCarthy's Remainder, neither of which achieves the unsettling mastery of Lennon's far shorter and infinitely superior novel, which could inspire a brilliant screenplay ... Familiar is fresh and original; it is also disturbing in its strangeness, because that strangeness is eerily real -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * The direct present-tense narration and instantly engaging plight prove an irresistible combination...One of the clever things about the set-up here is how neatly it invigorates some of drearier procedures of conventional fiction...a meditation on family and identity likely to stir brain and heart alike -- Anthony Cummins * Observer * Lennon is an American writer whose novels delicately probe the psychology of their protagonists...In Familiar Lennon uses his sci-fi vehicle to create eerie fiction. The notion of parallel universes becomes a metaphor for life choices and their results...immersion in her alternate realities prompts reflection upon the aleatory nature of our own life, in all its uncanniness -- Peter Carty * Independent on Sunday *