Brian Dillon writes:

Quite the most peculiar thing about The Escape, at least to begin with, is to be found at the level of plot and character. For his new novel Thirlwell has turned, surprisingly, to the conventional if contested motif of the elderly sybarite – best known from the fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike – whose declining sexual picaresque is set against historical or social forces which leave the ageing roué flummoxed and rueful. The Escape, or rather its protagonist, evinces a worldview that is best described as aspirant Rothdike: all raging self-justification and would-be poetic observation of the world one is about to abdicate.

(LRB 22 October 2009)

Cape | hardback 322 pp. |ISBN: 9780224089111