BUT NOW YOU’re HERE / REVIEWS
★★★★★
… But Now You're Here is so subtly great. Although advertising provides the backdrop, this isn't really a novel about advertising. It's a novel about people: the choices they make, the relationships they build, the opportunities they seize or miss, and the unpredictable ways a life unfolds.
The dialogue feels effortless. The characters are believable because they're never reduced to stereotypes. They're contradictory, vulnerable, funny and flawed, just as real people are. The writing has a quiet confidence about it. Nothing is overplayed. Nothing feels as though it's trying too hard.
What stayed with me most was the humanity. There is real warmth in these pages and a generosity towards the characters that is quietly moving.
Whether you've ever worked in advertising is almost beside the point. If you enjoy intelligent storytelling and beautifully observed characters, this is a novel you'll remember long after you've finished it.
ROBERT CAMPBELL
★★★★★
If you want a couple of days wandering down the memory lane that was the backdrop for the glittering 70s ad world and its fabulous, glamorous, sex and music driven inhabitants – you will not put this book down … It’s a seat-gripping thriller, skilfully crafted by the author who lived the dream and the nightmare. The best novel I’ve read in ages.
Susi Jenkins
★★★★★
…very much an entirely believable, living and breathing story of an ad person from that period.
The plot is difficult to describe without giving away the two – possibly three – absolutely massive twists, none of which I saw coming.
All I can tell you now is that a common observation amongst the people I know who’ve read it is that they, like me, could hardly put it down.
tim lindsay in Campaign magazine
★★★★★
Not a word wasted. Unputdownable, I read it from cover to cover in one sitting; an intriguing story that keeps you highly involved, moves effortlessly through the time frames and delivers a surprising end twist.
roger
★★★★★
This is my book of the year which managed to achieve the increasingly rare feat of making me miss Midsomer Murders, Gardeners World, two evening meals and, at one point, possibly an entire conversation. Suffice to say it contains the wildest plausibly implausible plot twist in history with lashings of humanity, wit and emotional intelligence. Oh and it has its own Spotify playlist – I cannot recommend it highly enough.
MARK HANCOCK
★★★★★
My holiday read recommendation is But Now You're Here.
Covering two distinct periods – the early seventies and late nineties – in evocative detail, the hero confronts both the challenges of his agency job and real-life events that will leave your jaw dropping and heart pounding. I loved it.
William Eccleshare, in Campaign Magazine
★★★★★
Absolutely loved it. Couldn't put it down and raced through it in a couple of days. It’s a beautiful but also heartbreaking love story set in my two favourite decades, the 70s and 90s, and to a backdrop of the advertising industry at the time. It’s both beautifully nostalgic and yet timeless.
Ms Lisa Batty
★★★★★
I read this on return flights across the Atlantic, which was apt, as the narrative unfolds in London and New York – two cities intimately evoked across a three-decade temporal arc starting in the early 1970s: streets, hangouts, music, moods, affectations
Intimacy is the book's central motif. The first-person protagonist happens to be male, but the far stronger characters are the two women with whom he yearns for never quite reciprocated closeness. From early on you know it is him who will get badly damaged; what you can't know, any more than he can, is how.
In the end, what happens in New York and London – and at one chilling moment in Paris – stays where any good writer wants it to: in the memory structures. I finished the book before landing back at Heathrow, only to sense that the book had not finished with me.