The Harder They Come - Hardcover

Boyle describes the evolution of pioneer to truther with an energy that is wholly seductive. He keeps you turning the pages even on the rare occasions when not much is happening (like the brilliant Karl Ove Knausgaard, he can make the cooking of a pork chop so exciting that you find yourself on the edge of your seat, devouring every detail of the salt being sprinkled into the pan). But where he really excels is in combining hearty helpings of sex and adventure with a considerable understanding of his country's ingrained problems. His vision of America's inevitable descent into moral and material starvation might be dark but the way he tells it is so gloriously, cheekily, full of colour that you can only sit back and applaud a master at work (The Times)

Thomas Coraghessan Boyle isn't the first writer to probe the American malaise, but he makes a two-fisted, Technicolor job of it in this violent saga of Vietnam veteran Sten Stenson and his son Adam . Nobody who sees America as a nation of gun-toting, survivalist nutters (soothed by golf) will find much in his impressive novel to challenge that view, as he digs away at the cultural overlap between being a rugged individualist and being a psycho (Sunday Times)

An intense and strangely beautiful observation of the country's inherent relationship with gun violence and anti-authoritarianism (Shortlist)

One of modern America's most indefatigable chroniclers (Metro)

Opens with headlong force . T C Boyle's Adam nods to R W B Lewis's The American Adam, a famous examination of US fiction which argues that the heroes of the early masterpieces echo de Crèvecoeur's belief that Americans are the "new man" in a New World, innocent of European sinfulness (Literary Review)

A raw, uncompromising novel with a powerful grip (Mail on Sunday)

My reading year began and almost-ends with T C Boyle. Taut and revelatory, his novel The Harder They Come deals with gun violence, anti-authoritarianism and environmental issues. His latest, The Terranauts, has just come out. It's an engrossing take on the Biosphere II experiment in the 1990s. If you don't know Boyle's work, you're in for a treat (Regi Clarie Herald)