Leaving the Sea
Reviews
A new short-story collection set in a distorted world where disease strikes at random and people disappear without trace. From the author of the dazzlingly original The Flame Alphabet and The Age of Wire and String.
Exhilarating and also at times hilarious... Thoroughly and perversely entertaining.
As the collection progresses, things get weirder... The stories are dystopic, nightmarish, Kafkaesque in their refusal to explain their own distortions. The writing is so sharp, the world seems made afresh with every story.
One of the most innovative writers of the concise form around. Leaving the Sea is a fascinating showcase of Marcus' stylistic range, though the stories are all linked by a heady mix of dystopia, absurdity and detached male protagonists. Marcus balances out the darker, more intense moments with well-placed comic lines. It's an absorbing collection, and marks out the author as an eclectic and valuable talent.
Relentlessly sardonic, cynical and ambitiously experimental in style... Leaving the Sea makes you want to tell everyone you know to go and read Ben Marcus.
Marcus is adept at putting his darker subject matter into relief with bright sparks of humour. Leaving the Sea left me sucker punched.
Leaving the Sea has plenty of the chair-gripping alienation that marks his previous books, but there's a greater emotional complexity. Thoroughly and perversely entertaining.
Ben Marcus is one of the most stunningly original and profoundly unsettling writers of his generation.
Intriguing... full of deft, dark humour.
The prose I lethal, dissecting, surprising, oblique… This is writing that pushes to the edge, where it's bleak and awful and darkly funny.
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