You Don't Have To Live Like This - Softcover

A bold and brilliant take on a long-established genre ... For Markovits - as for Dickens, Joyce and Woolf before him - the city is a constantly evolving organism against which the best stories can be told. (Elizabeth Day Prospect)

Is Benjamin Markovits contemporary fiction's best kept secret? .... [his] seventh novel is as profound a meditation on contemporary America as you're likely to read this year. (Max Liu Independent on Sunday)

It is a remarkable novel ... This is fiction writing that is alive in your hand. (Irish Independent)

You Don't Have to Live Like This is a very smart book, with vividly drawn characters and densely-woven themes ... at its heart is the vexatious question of race. (Mick Brown Daily Telegraph)

[A] consistently impressive novel: a strikingly current portrait of tinderbox race relations that also raises enduring questions about the good life and the nature of truth ... highly recommended. (Stephanie Cross Daily Mail)

Markovits articulates this irretrievably messy subject with exhilarating clarity and a good deal of bravery ... The prose delivers spare, fast-paced social realism (think Jonathan Franzen on Slimfast) and the plot is multi-stranded and gripping. (Claire Lowdon Sunday Times)

Terrifically readable ... a sweeping story of gentrification, class war and racism in America. (Literary Review)

[A] subtle and finely poised novel. (Stuart Kelly Spectator)

Entertaining, insightful, humorous yet of serious purpose. This is a very good novel. (The Herald (Glasgow))

[Markovits has] an eye for telling detail and a clear, compelling prose style ... this is a bold work of fiction with a firm real-world moral. (Francesca Wade Financial Times)

From one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists comes a darkly comic and brutally insightful vision of contemporary America in the wake of the global financial crisis. Ten years out of Yale, with an extra degree from Oxford, and all Greg Marnier has to show for it is a rambling academic career that has landed him in Aberystwyth. At his college reunion, jetlagged and drunk, he runs into an old friend who offers him an extraordinary way out. Robert James, wealthy and influential, a success story of the dotcom bubble, wants to become a political player. His plan: to buy up several abandoned neighbourhoods in Detroit - the poster child for urban decline - and build a new America from their boarded-up ruins. For a small investment, Marnier can transform himself into a twenty-first-century pioneer. The realities of life on America's urban frontier soon become apparent. For every hopeful misfit who's come for a fresh start there's a native Detroiter whose patch is being swallowed up by the new colonials. Marnier finds himself caught in the middle of everyone else's battles - between local and outsider, rich and poor, black and white - until a terrible accident forces him to take sides.