Now available in paperback

For all its bewildering unevenness, one wants to raise a cheer for We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. I can think of no other writer who could set a novel at the intersection between airport news-stand thriller, literary fiction, classical myth and documentary journalism, and spin from these materials a book to keep one reading through the small hours. Just as Meek was being conveniently typecast as Britain’s finest Russian novelist, he has confounded his readers’ expectations with a work utterly unlike his last. William Golding – another ironic pasticheur – used to do this unfailingly, to the bemusement of reviewers who wanted to keep him permanently pegged to his recasting of Ballantyne in Lord of the Flies. Like Golding, Meek is a novelist who at least deserves the compliment that heaven only knows what he’ll write next.

(LRB 7 February 2008)

Canongate | hardback 295 pp. |ISBN: 9781841959887