Paperback
Talent
By Juliet Lapidos
‘Deliciously funny’ Helen Oyeyemi
‘Enormously entertaining’ Lionel Shriver
‘Smart, brilliant … I love it so much!’ Joanna Cannon
A wickedly caustic tale of a student who stumbles on a literary treasure.
Anna Brisker is running out of ideas.
Her PhD advisor thinks she’s a let-down, her fellow students see her as roadkill on the way to academic success and her family have just stopped asking when she’s going to get a real job.
Then Anna Brisker stumbles on a rare notebook that could make her a literary sensation. If only she didn’t have to break the law to get it…
Talent is a deliciously wry portrayal of a brittle and brilliant young woman, and a wicked lampooning of campus life.
”'An unusual, involving literary mystery with a dry sense of humour” - Grazia
”'I enjoyed the wry take on academia; the visceral competition, the jaded supervisors, the imposing architecture, even the bars” - Daily Mail
”'Enormously entertaining” - Lionel Shriver
”'Lapidos' stabs at literary counterfeiting are inspired. She intersperses Anna's feckless investigation into Langley's past with notebook jottings that convincingly evoke the hunting and gathering of an alert writer as he sifts for fodder from childhood trauma and the detritus of daily experience” - New York Times Book Review
”'A smart, brilliant story - and so very wise and observant, and filled with such fabulously dry humour. I love it so much!” - Joanna Cannon
”'The ultimate literary caper … deliciously funny” - Helen Oyeyemi
”'A taut existential thriller for the philosophical detective in each of us… a gimlet-eyed, penetratingly comedic take on the campus novel” - Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
”'A clever and delightfully complicated debut novel… Each bend in this story raises more questions than are answered, in the best of ways and right to the end. More than a few little Easter eggs of literary trivia are offered along the way, too” - San Francisco Chronicle
”'A wry meditation on ambition and an ingeniously constructed parable for our times …. with wide-ranging erudition and pitch-perfect repartee” - Lucy Ives, author of Impossible Views of the World
”'A fast-moving, witty, literary adventure. With Pop-Tarts” - John Crowley, author of Little, Big
”'I love a campus novel, especially when nearly everyone on campus is equally clueless. With dry, witty prose and a motley assortment of sharp voices, Talent finds hypocrisy and obsession in all the right places” - Rosecrans Baldwin, author of The Last Kid Left