Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Reviews / Votes

Tower's prose is muscular and poetic with an almost vertiginous momentum and his characters teeter on the brink of emotional collapse ... This is a collection that, for once, lives up to the hype. Watch out for Wells * Sunday Times * Short stories exploring love, violence and the fear that has us lying, eyes open, in the dark. An extraordinary debut and a sensitive, surprising voice * The Times Review * Reading them, you are reminded of how Richard Ford, a master of the craft, once proposed the quality of "audacity" as the defining characteristic of perfect short stories, suggesting that they were always "the high-wire act of literature". In this sense, Tower certainly makes you crane your neck * Observer * Like David Foster Wallace, Tower taps into what lies beneath, often comically. There are dazzling points of light and compassion in the darkness * Independent on Sunday * The failed American dream is frequently picked over in literature, but this debut collection of short stories will make you feel you've never read about it before ... the disarming honesty and startling imagery make each tale an intense, articulate and near-tangible nugget of cultural disaffection * Sunday Telegraph * Stories from modern America - angry young men, mellow young men, troubled teenage girls, sons visiting demented fathers - by an edgy, ultra-realist young writer. * The Times * Towers is an original, with an extraordinary way with words * The Times *