A witty, irreverant and elegaic new novel...Haffner is a Quixote of our time

A novel where the humour is melancholic, the melancholy mischievous and the talent startling

In The Escape, you can practically see Bellow’s Augie March, Roth’s Mickey Sabbath and Martin Amis’s John Self applauding, ghost-like, from the margins... The novel fizzes with intelligence, verbal skill and humour

Beautifully written, poignant and clever... Thirlwell has a genuinely unique insight into humankind

The Escape is one of the best British novels I’ve read this year for one reason; Thirlwell’s prose. At once effervescent and elegant, his narrative voice lifts the novel’s lecherous comedy beyond the sublunary lovers’ antics into a more rarefied sphere

A wittily observant young author... Audacious

Witty and engaging, erudite but fleet and sinuous; the questions he asks are lightly posed, his mock grandeur dispersing in a sea of ridiculous incident and comic undercutting… In this playful, eloquent novel, Adam Thirlwell demonstrates that knowing why one acts as one does is rarely the whole answer, or much more than the beginning of a question

The narrative develops a sense of authenticity that is persuasive enough not to be disturbed, even by the inevitable adventurous sex scene

The Escape is an utterly glorious piece of work...Thirlwell has with this superb book also staked a rightful claim as a literary phenomenon

Thirwell's novel elegantly portrays the ageing Haffner's thrilling attempts to escape from lovers, the mafia, his family and himself

The writing is polished and full of allusions