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Published Jan 2015
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
South London, May 2010: foxes are behaving strangely, Burmese immigrants are going missing, and everyone is trying to get hold of a new party drug called Glow. A young man suffering from a rare sleep disorder will uncover the connections between all these anomalies in this taut, riveting new novel by a young writer hailed by The Guardian as "playful, arresting, unnerving, opulent, rude and—above all—deliciously, startlingly, exuberantly fresh."
Twenty-two-year-old Raf spends his days walking Rose, a bull terrier who guards the transmitters for a pirate radio station, and his nights at raves in warehouses and launderettes. When his friend Theo vanishes without a trace, Raf's efforts to find him will lead straight into the heart of a global corporate conspiracy. Meanwhile, he's falling in love with a beautiful young woman he met at one of those raves, but he'll soon discover that there is far more to Cherish than meets the eye.
Combining the pace, drama, and explosive plot twists of a thriller with his trademark intellectual, linguistic, and comedic pyrotechnics, Glow is Ned Beauman's most compelling, virtuosic, and compulsively readable novel yet.
"A respectable effort to play with the thriller form that gets bogged down by those very same thriller mechanics." - Kirkus
"Beauman writes like a dream (bicycle couriers have a "famished muscularity"), but his plotting is nothing more than a framework supporting a glimpse into a dystopian slacker universe, as well as the neurochemistry of mind-altering substances and the global drug trade." - Publishers Weekly
"A novel to restore one's faith in modern fiction- a thrillingly literary book: every page offers sentences that are a pure pleasure to read, rhythmic and witty, full of resonant variation. This is the real deal: no turgid lyricism here... Beauman is a prodigy." The Sunday Business Post
"Glow does not glow- it dazzles." - The Independent
"It's exciting to witness someone mythologising London with such brains and humour, shards of reality strung into something both synthetic and magical... [Beauman] uses the internet and its concomitant technologies inventively rather than as token gestures of what's current. Google Maps, You Tube, facial recognition software, internet message boards and gaming become vital parts of the novel's engineering." - The Telegraph
"I can say, unequivocably, that Glow may mess with your head, but is also addictively good." - The Times
"We are in the presence of a genuine talent here... . Beauman's great originality and skill [and] intelligent aesthetic often provide pure revitalising reading pleasure; he is playful, arresting, unnerving, opulent, rude and- above all, deliciously, startingly, exuberantly fresh." - The Guardian
This information about Glow was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ned Bauman was born in London in 1985 and studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His first novel, Boxer, Beetle, won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award and the Goldberg Prize; his second, The Teleportation Accident, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. In 2013, he was the youngest on Granta's once-a-decade list of the Best Young British Novelists.
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