How to Make a Bomb

Reviews / Votes

Riveting and enigmatic -- Jake Kerridge * The Telegraph * An exceptional, frightening and curiously persuasive novel. I hope it brings Thomson the attention and reward that one our finest and most imaginative novelists clearly deserves. -- Miranda Seymour * Financial Times * A magnetic portrait of one man's radicalisation ... the text sparkles with clarity and precision, and frequently beauty too ... a book that strikes to the core of our age of uncertainty. -- Lucy Scholes * The Telegraph * Thomson is a skillful and deliberate writer ... How to Make a Bomb is, at one level, a satire of existentialism ... It is also a comic novel about radicalisation: a literary Four Lions for the age of the "incel" -- Caleb Klaces * The Guardian * I devoured [this book] in a single sitting. The sense of dislocation - and location - made it seem like a dream of another life, all of it so lyrical and yet narratively acute. A wonderful achievement. * Jonathan Lethem * Masterfully ambiguous ... [How to Make a Bomb raises] complicated questions ... but doesn't neatly wrap them up. Rather, it allows the ideological inquiries at the center of the book to linger and bloom for continued consideration ... [The book] provides a powerfully evocative catalyst for thought and feeling. -- Matt Bell * New York Times * Thomson skillfully balances things on the brink of explosion, creating suspense worthy of a thriller in a work grounded in literary tradition ...This eloquent novel manages to give a new resonance to the big questions of our age, inviting us to look for answers within. -- Anna Aslanyan * The Spectator * A riot and very compelling - quite dark, as usual, but funny too... Thomson is an extraordinary writer. -- Samantha Morton * Observer * An utterly absorbing and elegantly written novel about the deepest of existential questions: how we should live. Rupert Thomson is truly one of our most brilliant and original writers * Graeme Macrae Burnet, author of Case Study and His Bloody Project * An outstanding, compulsive work from a rare talent. Rupert Thomson continues to make my jaw drop with each book. * Irenosen Okojie * Wonderful ... The intensity and specificity of the language is a revelation, so forensic it anchored me to every page. * Russell Celyn Jones * A novel that turns a midlife crisis inside out, rewardingly...the result, in Thomson's expert hands, is fast-paced and headlong; the book ends up rewiring the reader's sense of what's banal and what's not. A work about estrangement and solitude that's surprisingly rapid, engaging, light-footed. * Kirkus Reviews * PRAISE FOR RUPERT THOMSON: 'Each novel he writes is a new vision of a new world; he's the least predictable, the most surprising of writers.' Philip Pullman; 'Hands down, Rupert Thomson is one of my favourite writers of all time. I impatiently wait for his new novels and he never disappoints.' Andrea Wulf; 'When someone writes as well as Thomson does, it makes you wonder why other people bother.' * New Statesman *