Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam
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Blurb: ‘She was coming toward him in a crooked purple tube top and baggy shorts and brassy sandals studded with rhinestones. She carried a huge pink patent-leather purse and was possibly the worst thing he’d seen all day. ‘Hi.’ She had a little gap between her teeth, and her eyes were wide set, and she had one of those noses with perfectly round nostrils. She was a pale little freckled pig with eyelashes. ‘I’m supposed to ask you for a cigarette.’ This ugly kid before Lamb was obviously the brunt of a joke. Stupid. And reckless. Had they any idea who he was? Why he was standing alone in a black suit? What kind of heart, if any, hung inside him? And how was this not a joke on him? He took a pull on his own cigarette and put it out on the bottom of his beautifully polished shoe.’
Tommie is eleven. Lamb is a middle-aged man. He is convinced that he can help her avoid a destiny of apathy and emptiness. He even comes to believe that his devotion is in her best interest. (Hutchinson, 2012)
Stephanie Cross, The Daily Mail
“The reader’s dread is held in tension with scenic passages of lyrical beauty, to extraordinarily compelling effect. Add in pitch-perfect dialogue and this utterly assured, high-stakes, high-wire act of a novel is proof that Nadzam is a very special talent indeed.”
Nisha Lilia Diu, The Daily Telegraph
“It’s a bold book and the unfolding catastrophe as its heart is as morbidly compelling as a car crash. More than half of this lean, pacy tale is told in dialogue, lending it the immediacy of a film script. Nadzam only gives us Lamb’s point of view and, with it, the unsettling feeling of being complicit in his actions.”
David Evans, The Financial Times
“All the while the narration strikes an intimate tone (the protagonists are designated “our guy” and “our girl”), intended, perhaps, to evoke in the reader a queasy sense of complicity. The result is a morbidly fascinating debut; Nadzam’s beautiful prose makes the flesh creep.”
Peter Carty, The Independent
“Nadzam is harking back to the canonical work of this incendiary genre, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. If David Lamb and Nabokov’s anti-hero Humbert Humbert are both over-blessed with verbal felicity, there are diverting points of difference. Humbert is a wretch, a sophisticated satyr aware of the black comedy of his dark compulsion, while Lamb is upright and innocent, laid low by his debilitating neediness. It would be unreasonable to expect Nadzam to match Nabokov’s shimmering brilliance, but even so this is fiction of striking distinction.”
Alfred Hickling, The Guardian
“You could reasonably claim that Nabokov has written this book already; yet Nadzam’s debut is even more disturbing, as Tommie is no precocious Lolita, but a gap-toothed pre-teen whose very ordinariness is arresting: “The shorts hung around her pelvic bones and her stomach stuck out like a dirty spotted white sheet. It was grotesque. It was lovely.” ”
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