Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2014
400 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
July 1940. Eleven-year-old Lydia walks through a village in rural Suffolk on a baking hot day. She is wearing a gas mask. The shops and houses are empty, windows boarded up and sandbags green with mildew, the village seemingly deserted. Leaving it behind, she strikes off down a country lane through the salt marshes to a large Edwardian house -- the house she grew up in. Lydia finds it empty too, the windows covered in black-out blinds. Her family is gone. Late that night he comes, a soldier, gun in hand and heralding a full-blown German invasion. There are, he explains to her, certain rules she must now abide by. He won't hurt Lydia, but she cannot leave the house. Is he telling the truth? What is he looking for? Why is he so familiar? And how does he already know Lydia's name? Eerie, thrilling and piercingly sad, The Dynamite Room evokes the great tradition of war classics yet achieves a strikingly original and contemporary resonance. Hypnotically compelling, it explores, in the most extreme of circumstances, the bonds we share that make us human.
"An unusual, intricate drama delivered with accomplishment." - Kirkus Reviews
"With its unshowy, confident prose, this novel is accomplished, resonant and surprising, and poses some delicately handled questions about whether redemption is possible, and at what point a good heart becomes forever besmirched." - The Guardian (UK)
"Ambitious and often gripping...Hewitt has a strong sense of narrative pace and brings a strange poetry to his depiction of an exhausted and empty world...A very promising first novel." - The Observer (UK)
"Wow. Wonderful." - Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee and Gold
"Suspenseful and powerful. A novel of great humanity that exposes the absurd contradictions of war." - Samantha Harvey, author of The Wilderness, short-listed for the Orange Prize and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize
"Superb. Absorbing, suspenseful and with a beautifully poetic touch." - Nathan Filer, author of the Costa Award-winning The Shock of the Fall
"Clever and unsettling, this most unconventional of war stories had me totally gripped." - Shelley Harris, author of Jubilee
"An effective psychological drama between two extraordinary characters. Claustrophobic, touching, character-driven, and told in lovely prose...Readers who loved The Boy in the Striped Pajamas will have a strong affinity with The Dynamite Room." - Katie Ward, author of Girl Reading
This information about The Dynamite Room 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.
Jason Hewitt is a playwright and actor. He was born in Oxford, and lives in London. The Dynamite Room is his first novel.
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