A riveting, thrillerish plot. Here is a stylist who's also a fabulous storyteller... A treat

An elegant, moving and intelligent book

Gripping and beautifully written

Grips the reader from the start... Lean, artful, assured

James Lasdun is a tremendous writer and Seven Lies is that rare thing, a novel that delivers on every level. It is so gripping that you want to gobble it down at a single sitting, and yet the prose is so exacting that you want to linger over every sentence

The descriptive brilliance leaves a lasting impression

Lasdun's second novel has much of the thriller about it. But its more sinuous power comes from other duplicities in Stefan's previous life: a glorious section of the book involves his teenage self plagiarising Walt Whitman to impress his mother's salon, all the while bribing a pederast janitor with aquavit to gain access to the source material

The imaginativeness with which he explores the politics of expectation and failure runs deep...Seven Lies combines the knuckle-whitening tension of a thriller with literary wit and the precision of a surgeon seeking to tease out rotten flesh. Definitely a novel to be admired

Seven Lies...has a way of enlarging the spirit and refreshing the mind far more comprehensively than many books with twice its 200 pages

[T]his seems to be an artful evocation of the effect of totalitarianism on the individual. But if this sounds drably psychological, I am doing the novel a disservice: it is short, intense, powerful and superbly crafted

Intricately plotted and structured, its prose both elegant and poised, Seven Lies could be read as a fable about the political and spiritual corruption endemic in a totalitarian state. It is, however, very much concerned with the human cost of deception and betrayal

A brilliant and darkly funny tale of politics and paranoia