64 Clarke - Softcover

Evoking the grubby desperation of trying to live on your wits in London in a way not done since Martin Amis' astonishing London Fields, 64 CLARKE manages to be unsettling and wry at the same time . . . One of the best urban novels in the last few years. Holmes has really announced himself as someone to watch. - Irish Independent 'Full of dry humour and precise observation . . . the end offers an unexpected and highly disturbing twist. Bleak, funny [and] moving' - Natasha Cooper, The Times Literary Supplement Holmes makes wonderfully precise and witty observations - Time Out Holmes has a gift for dissecting the lives of small crooks with big dreams and bigger problems. - Scotland on Sunday Holmes builds an effortlessly exciting story, with characters who will take up long-term lodgings in the reader s imagination. - Morning Star Holmes has a cheeky, sarcastic and distinctive prose style . . . There are times, reading 64 CLARKE, when you think "if Martin Amis was less concerned with style and more interested in fashioning a story - like he was circa London Fields - he would write like this" . . . 64 CLARKE is a corker. - Bookmunch Holmes draws vivid characters - Herald Spot-on dialogue . . . a satisfying, intensely readable story that will have readers biting their fingernails. - Yvonne Crittenden

Six-year-old Ben Snape was separated from his father on the platform of Finsbury Park tube station on the afternoon of Saturday, February 22. He hasn't been seen since. On the ground floor of 64 Clarke Street lives Max, a man with a shadowy past and an increasingly troubled present, which his noisy upstairs neighbours are doing nothing to soothe. They are aspiring journalist Sophie and her boyfriend Dash, who makes a living selling sub-standard speakers from the back of a white van. But how will Dash's somewhat less than respectable occupation lead him to get inexorably tangled up in Max's mysterious plans? And what connects them both to Ben's disappearance?