I fucking love England.
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Outside the crime genre (Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, Walter Mosley) and the novels of John Fante, Charles Bukowski has stood alone as the great fictional chronicler of Los Angeles life. Until now. Brilliant though he is, his novels do not have the ambition, scope and pin-sharp execution of James Frey’s truly exceptional debut novel, Bright Shiny Morning.
From the grotesquely ostentatious lifestyles of the super-rich to the panhandling itinerants of Venice Beach, Frey has brought us a huge array of LA characters and pulled together a brilliant and multi-faceted portrait of the City of Angels, combining snippets of fact and history with multiple fictional threads to produce a mind-blowing work of fiction.
Harsh reality, humour, extreme violence and moments of the utmost tenderness can all be found here in a virtuoso novel that is sure to resonate for many years to come as the first great LA novel. A modern masterpiece of American fiction, which should have DeLillo, McCarthy and other American fiction heavyweights pondering on the sudden arrival of a stranger in their midst.