Your Life Without Me

James Meek is one of our most consistently brilliant and thought-provoking writers. This is his best novel yet - a dark and unsettling meditation on marriage, fatherhood and architecture. Every page rings with deep truth -- ALEX PRESTON
Unsettling and boasting a haunting twist, this is one of our great prose writers on guilt, complicity and forgiveness * * Observer * *
A beautifully elegant writer . . . This is a novel of ideas . . . big ideas about the conflict between progress and nostalgia [and] our relationship with the past -- STEPHANIE MERRITT * * BBC Radio 4 Front Row * *
James Meek is a master of the art of the stealthy narrative, and his keen intelligence and alertness are evident on every page of his new novel . . . Heart-breaking -- RUPERT THOMSON
Your Life Without Me follows a retired schoolteacher as he tries to discover whether it was his influence that landed a favourite former pupil in prison for a radical act of destruction . . . A novel that is a profound and unsettling take on modern life by a writer at the top of his game -- KIRSTY LANG
Engrossing and compassionate . . . Meek's fine novel is itself a provocation; tragic, humbling and rejuvenating all at once * * Financial Times * *
A novel with telling things to say about consumer culture, architecture, marriage, radicalism and the mistakes parents make . . . The novel is also a potent tale about the unknowability of people and what loved ones leave behind when they are gone. -- MARTIN CHILTON * * Independent * *
A complex narrative that seeks to peg an absorbing domestic psychodrama to hot-button talking points on the state of Britain . . . thoughtful and heartfelt, not least on the challenges of parenting adult children * * Daily Mail * *
Your Life Without Me is remarkable as it is about ordinary people in ordinary places (Mr Burman lives in an unspecified north) with extraordinary interiors. To end a novel with an almost ecstatic limbo and loneliness is quite an achievement . . . Meek threw out the rule book: what seemed like social commentary and family drama becomes a truly gothic interaction -- STUART KELLY * * Scotsman * *
James Meek's latest novel Your Life Without Me explores great contemporary themes of consumerism, terrorism, and the challenges of how to be your authentic self in a mediated, self-aware world. This suggests a mighty tome; instead, it's a little gem. In tending to these themes through one family, the Burmans, these explorations are much more personal and all the more moving and resonant for it -- VIKKI REILLY * * Scotsman * *