Campbell makes you want to read the next page. It's as simple as that... what it is good at being is a book... It is very good on the sub-surface: its perspectives rotate, like the dealership round a card table. It has the courage to be unpleasant about its characters, and the heart to challenge that unpleasantness. It is, in fact, cleverer than it lets on.

…you need know nothing about cards to relish the scabrous black comedy of… Tom Campbell’s scintillating debut novel… The pages of lean, measured prose ping with telling bons mots and, as the stakes are raised, the ruthless gamesmanship involving drugs and indecent exposure defies you not to laught out loud

...the book is so warm it makes such evenings quite appealing, however bizarre the events and motivations they may hide...You find in the end a Tony Parsonsesque bittersweetness, with an authoritative look at these fortysomethings.

FOLD is fresh, blackly funny and aimed unashamedly at us blokes... Leading their "lives of quiet desperation", one of the group - unlucky, bitter, a loser - decides he will bring down the alpha male. The result, not at all obvious, and nicely ambiguous, has consequences for everyone as they decide whether to raise...or fold. Definitely an author to watch. Oh, and a great cover!"<br />

...a tale of friendship and rivalry, jokers and kings, but more alarmingly it reads as a hilarious expose of the insane levels of competition between blokes.