Outside Looking In

Boyle offers a cautionary account of those heady days as the Loney family suffers the personal costs of free love and freak-outs -- Jeffrey Burke * Mail on Sunday * A pitch-dark sex comedy -- Anthony Cummins * Daily Mail * The undisputed master Boyle is brilliant at charting the currents of euphoria and idealism around Leary, the phantasmagorical effects of LSD, and Fitzs eventual slide into self-destruction. Boyle blurs the boundaries between the fact and fiction, adding a novelistic shimmer and richness to what the histories already tell us A roller-coaster morality tale of the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom -- Mick Brown * Daily Telegraph * Boyle renders the hypnotic, quasi-academic mood of the commune skilfully, capturing the participants initial belief that this was a serious spiritual quest. This moment in the mid-Sixties before the bonkers hippy movement of the west coast took over the counter-culture from the intellectuals from the east, is fascinating As the story of one mans descent into madness, and the folly of communal living and doing drugs for breakfast its a thrilling read * The Times * A virtuoso performance by Boyle joyous, mad-scientist slapstick, frightening, profound and even erotic * Herald * By far and away one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today ... A mesmerising storyteller -- Lionel Shriver Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges -- Barbara Kingsolver A virtuoso craftsman -- Annie Proulx Funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at. Boyles dissections are far too accurate. One moment youre watching the antics of a narcissistic cast; the next youre finding it all heartbreakingly human -- M John Harrison You dont feel cheated, reading Boyle while the head knows theres manipulation and artifice, the heart thumps * Observer * Boyle has a talent for describing events we may never experience with an arresting matter-of-factness. There is a thrill to this, and to not knowing where he will take us next -- Chris Power * Guardian * A sort of Frank Zappa of American letters Like the Beat writers before him, Boyle documents American life in the underbelly. Boyle is incapable of writing a boring sentence ... he is a master of the short story form * Financial Times * Thomas Coraghessan Boyle isnt the first writer to probe the American malaise, but he makes a two-fisted, Technicolor job of it * Sunday Times * Masterful -- Philip Womack * Daily Telegraph * Brilliant His characters are portrayed with sympathy and internal complexity, even if theyre still crazy * New Statesman * One of our finest chroniclers Boyle is always going outside himself, jumping into foreign skins The best of Boyles novels warn against the varieties of human extremism: our problems may be grave, he often says, but we make them worse by acting on our unexamined impulses and convictions * Independent *

T. C. Boyle is the New York Times-bestselling author of sixteen novels including The Tortilla Curtain, Drop City, San Miguel and The Terranauts, and eleven collections of stories. His work has been translated into twenty-six languages. He is the recipient most recently of the Jonathan Swift Prize, the Mark Twain Voice in American Literature Award and the Henry David Thoreau Award. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in California. tcboyle.com