Bestselling British author Sebastian Faulks reinvents the unreliable narrator with his singular, haunting creation—Mike Engleby.
"My name is Mike Engleby, and I'm in my second year at an ancient university."
With that brief introduction we meet one of the most mesmerizing, singular voices in a long tradition of disturbing narrators. Despite his obvious intelligence and compelling voice, it is clear that something about solitary, odd Mike is not quite right. When he becomes fixated on a classmate named Jennifer Arkland and she goes missing, we are left with the looming question: Is Mike Engleby involved? As he grows up, finding a job and even a girlfriend in London, Mike only becomes more and more detached from those around him in an almost anti-coming-of-age. His inability to relate to others and his undependable memory (able to recall countless lines of text yet sometimes incapable of summoning up his own experiences from mere days before) lead the reader down an unclear and often darkly humorous path where one is never completely comfortable or confident about what is true.
Mike Engleby is a chilling and unforgettable character, and Engleby is a novel that will surprise and beguile Sebastian Faulks' readership.
Praise for Sebastian Faulks
“Overpowering and beautiful . . . A great novel.”
—Simon Schama, The New Yorker
“Superb . . . unrelenting and dispassionate . . . genuinely cathartic.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Birdsong moved me more profoundly than anything I’ve read in years. . . . A deeply compassionate, utterly thrilling work by a master of the form.”
—Frank Conroy
“Worthy in every way of its honors and success. . . .The accounts of combat, ringing with credibility and authenticity, are among the finest that I have ever read.”
—George Garrett, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Smart, well-wrought . . . On Green Dolphin Street does everything an old-fashioned novel is supposed to do. . . . It will provoke and linger.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Faulks is an exquisite observer…The characters inhabit a setting so exotic and vivid, so correct in all its details, that it floods them with animating light.”
—Newsday
“When passion erupts, Faulks is equal to the task. His prose gets it just right.”
— Washington Post Book World
Sebastian Faulks worked as a journalist for fourteen years before taking up writing full-time in 1991. In 1995 he was voted Author of the Year by the British Book Awards for Birdsong, his fourth novel and his second, following A Fool's Alphabet, to be published in the United States. He is also the author of Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, Charlotte Gray, The Fatal Englishman, and The Girl at the Lion d’Or. He lives in London with his wife and three children.
