Faber & Faber

I came to Jamaica with a broken heart. I was twenty – maybe the best time to have your heart broken. The teens are spent lurching from one emotional train wreck to another, but underlying the pain rests the knowledge that things are not yet serious, that your heart is not yet quite en jeu. [...]

Alex’s new book “The Revelations” is due to be published in February 2012. Please check back after this date for critical response to the book.

Media reviews of The Revelations

A heartstoppingly gripping novel about what happens when a movement becomes more important than the lives of its followers.

We didn’t really do Gap Years in Worthing. Gap Years were for the beautiful daughters of Kensington millionaires to screw their way through a ski season and then find spiritual redemption in India, or for the double barreled sons of City financiers to dye their already flushed cheeks vermillion in the Africa sun. But due [...]

I read Stuart Evers’ blog about Georges Perec’s fabulous Life A User’s Manual with great interest (Evers adds a colon to the title of Perec’s novel that doesn’t appear in my copy). One of the bitter shades who haunt that journalistic Abaddon, comments sections, suggested beneath my review of Evers’ Ten Stories About Smoking on [...]

This Bleeding City was published a year ago today. I thought I’d try to write down some of the thoughts and impressions that occur to me as I contemplate this mad, fantastic year. Firstly, though, I guess I should look back two years, back to when my agent delivered the novel to Faber, and a [...]

I received a small book for Christmas. Hardback, its cover reminded me of the elegant wallpaper of some Bloomsbury salon: dark green leaves and what might be sloe berries against an ecru background. The book tells the story of a girl called Sally Waite, the precocious daughter of a well-off Southern couple, whom we first meet [...]

I always used to feel like Philip Larkin walking past Shoreditch House on my way home from work. There were things going on inside – wonderful, exotic, sensual events laced with coke and deviancy and delight. But I was too old. Only just; but definitively. I had no place amongst the young and the beautiful [...]

I was writing an essay on Beckett’s prose and the minimalist composers recently, and something kept nagging at the edge of my consciousness. The thesis of the piece I was working on was that Beckett, like Philip Glass or Steve Reich, uses the interaction of repetition and snatched moments of extraordinary lyricism to convey life [...]