Rupert Thomson Books In Order

Dreams of Leaving

Moses Highness, a habitue of the clubs and all night parties of London in the 1980s, is searching for his past. For many years in the village of New Egypt, run by the sad*istic Chief Inspector Peach, his parents had harboured one fervent wish that their baby son Moses should escape.

The Five Gates of Hell

Moon Beach place of the dead where once a year the city observes the Day of the Dead. During one such celebration, two young men from different worlds become the fascinated servants of an entrepreneur of death, whose private passions are intimately entwined with his vocation. ‘Ghoulish and imaginative…
ingenious, sardonic and seductive.’ New York Times Times Book Review.

Air and Fire

At the end of the nineteenth century, Theo a7phile Valance and his wife Suzanne sail into Santa Sofi a7a, a remote Mexican copper mining town. By the author of The Five Gates of Hell.

The Insult

‘We are in the dark side of the brain full of grief and deliciously strange comedy. I’ve never read anything like it.’ Michael OndaatjeWith this eerie, provocative, and utterly original novel, Rupert Thomson takes the psychological thriller into unexplored territory. Martin Blom is walking toward his car in a supermarket parking lot when a single random bullet pierces his brain. From that moment he is blind his doctor says permanently. But then one evening Martin discovers what is either a genuine miracle or a delusion suffered occasionally by the newly blind: in the dark, he can see. Armed with this ambiguous gift, Thomson’s protagonist enters a nocturnal world of strip clubs and sleazy hotels. In that world, an alluring young woman may give herself to the one man she thinks is unable to see her, only to vanish inexplicably. In that world, a blind man may become a murder suspect. And in the gorgeously disorienting world of The Insult, reality itself is a consensual hallucination. And you succumb to it at your own risk. ‘Reads like an unholy collaboration between Oliver Sacks and Edgar Allan Poe.’ Time Out ‘Thomson is a master stylist, a virtuoso of the hallucinatory image, a writer with a dark vision and a bright future.’ Washington Post

Soft

‘A tight, hypnotic…
fast paced, almost cinematic narrative.’ Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesFormer bouncer Barker Dodds wants nothing more than to flee his violent past for a quaint existence as a barber in London. Waif like Glade Spencer drifts through life as a waitress at a Soho caf . And ambitious marketing executive Jimmy Lyle, eager to please his new American boss, devises a revolutionary strategy for introducing a new, orange colored beverage, Soft!, into an already oversaturated market. In this compulsively readable psychological thriller, these three unlikely souls meet. When leaks start to develop in Lyle’s highly original though, illegal strategy, Barker is paid a visit by a friend from his old life, and is soon is presented with an unthinkable dilemma. And the person with whom he now shares a destiny unbeknownst to her is Glade. At turns harrowing and darkly humorous, Soft! is a magnificently surreal story, and a social satire of the highest literary order.’Stimulating and seductive…
. A pulp poetic melodrama.’ San Francisco Chronicle’ A twisted thriller that will keep you turning the pages until four in the morning.’ Details

The Book Of Revelation

In an edgy psychological thriller that is as mesmerizing as it is profound, Rupert Thomson fearlessly delves into the darkest realm of the human spirit to reveal the sinister connection between sexuality and power. Stepping out of his Amsterdam studio one April afternoon to buy cigarettes for his girlfriend, a dashing 29 year old Englishman reflects on their wonderful seven year relationship, and his stellar career as an internationally acclaimed dancer and choreographer. But the nameless protagonist’s destiny takes an unthinkably horrifying turn when a trio of mysterious cloaked and hooded women kidnap him, chain him to the floor of a stark white room to keep as their sexual prisoner, and subjected him to eighteen days of humiliation, mutilation, and rape. Then, after a bizarrely public performance, he is released, only to be held captive in the purgatory of his own guilt and torment: The realization that no one will believe his strange story. Coolly revelatory, meticulously crafted, The Book Of Revelation is Rupert Thomson at his imaginative best.

Divided Kingdom

Following The Book of Revelation a premise made terrifyingly real by a hugely talented writer, wrote The New York Times Book Review Rupert Thomson now explores a radical social experiment in a novel both politically provocative and personally mesmerizing.

One night a boy who comes to be called Thomas Perry is taken from his family, caught up in a comprehensive unraveling of what had been a united kingdom. The powers that be reacting to their country’s inexorable decline into consumerism, turpitude, racism, and violence establish in its place four independent republics based on the perceived nature of the citizens assigned to each, and reinforce these new partitions with concrete barricades and razor wire. Renamed, relocated, and granted favored status, Thomas enjoys one success after another until, as a devoted civil servant, he suddenly falls out of the system entirely and travels illegally throughout a realm now utterly divided, his life in constant jeopardy. And by witnessing the best and worst and strangest of what society and human nature can offer, he begins to understand how little he knows of his true self or the desires and needs that define satisfaction and happiness for everyone.

A highly realistic portrait of a world that doesn t exist, but which bears odd, unsettling resemblances to our own, this is fiction of supreme originality and accomplishment.

Death of a Murderer

Rupert Thomson a true master, according to the San Francisco Chronicle now gives us his most powerful work yet: the story of a woman who, even after her death, inflames an entire nation, and of the man who comes under her spell. Having spent decades in prison for crimes gruesomely familiar to everyone in England, this murderer has finally died of natural causes but is no less notorious in death than she was in life. Billy Tyler, a career policeman, has been assigned the task of guarding her body to make sure, he’s told, that nothing happens. But alone on a graveyard shift his wife begged him not to accept, Billy has occasion to contemplate the various turns his life has taken, his complicated thoughts about violence in himself and society, the unease that distances him from marital disappointment and a damaged daughter, and, finally, why it is that this reviled murderer, in the eerie silence of the hospital morgue, seems to speak to him directly and know him more fully than anyone else. In this dark night of the soul, his own problems and anxieties gradually acquire a new and unexpected significance, giving rise to questions that should haunt us all: Whom do we love, and why? How do we protect our children? And what separates us from those we call monsters?A gripping revelation of crime, of punishment and of what we desperately seek to hide from ourselves.