Pictures Of You Book

After every night of coke-fuelled infidelities, magazine editor Martin Powell takes a smoked ham sandwich to bed in Matt Thorne's Pictures of You. He's that kind of a man. Reliable--up to a point--and, in spite of spending his waking hours editing one of Britain's least respected men's magazines, a down-to-earth bloke. His faithful assistant Alison, on the other hand, is not so much down-to-earth as one of nature's true doormats. She goes out to earn the money while her flatmates--feckless boyfriend Adrian and her pathologically promiscuous sister Suzanne--eat their way through the larder. But, as we join Martin and Alison in Thorne's latest, stylishly witty yarn, everything is on the cusp of change. Martin's comfortable routine of one-night stands and discrete lap-dancing clubs is about to turn nasty. Very nasty. And Alison's about to discover that she has the power to transform--not just her own life, but Martin's with it. Matt Thorne's skill--honed to near-perfection in his three previous novels, Tourist, Eight Minutes Idle and Dreaming of Strangers--lies in his precise, almost surgical dissection of characters and relationships. The uneasy truce between good-girl Alison and her wildcat sister, the death throes of Martin's marriage to the world-weary Claudia--all are painted with a vivid and convincing attention to detail that the likes of Julian Barnes should envy. Equally remarkable is Thorne's ceaselessly funny world-view--one that never fails to induce an element of the sardonic into the bleakest of situations. For a snapshot of real people in turmoil, you can't do better than this book. --Matthew BaylisRead More