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May 13, 2008

This entry was written by  Susan Tranter

The Lying Tongue

I like a literary potboiler as much as the next person. If you liked The Shadow of the Wind, or The Cutting Room, then you might enjoy a book I've just whizzed through, the debut novel from Andrew Wilson called The Lying Tongue. It features a reclusive author who hasn't published a line since writing an acclaimed novel back in the sixties, a crumbling Venetian palazzo, a scurry of eager biographers keen to uncover the shady secrets of the reclusive author's past, a blackmailer, and the narrator - a young man who becomes the writer's assistant, but who has a few shady secrets of his own...

Wilson's also written a biography of Patricia Highsmith, which I dipped into about a year ago. There are a few comparisons with Highsmith plastered on the jacket of the novel, and at first I took them for rather lazy links, but as the book wore on I began to see what they meant. Remember the ambitious, manipulative, self-deluded Ripley, anyone?

Posted: May 13, 2008, 10:54:01 am (UK time)

Susan Tranter is the Online Reader in Residence on the encompass website.

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