Outerbridge Reach

`A tough, elegant, alarming novel. Stone writes superbly about the sea, about fear and loneliness, about life in extremis . . . In Outerbridge Reach, he has produced what I believe will come to be recognized as a quintessential novel of the Reagan era, along with Updike's Rabbit at Rest and Don DeLillo's Mao II ' John Banville, Guardian `Stone has already written two of the best novels of the past twenty years, Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise. Outerbridge Reach makes it three . . . He is a great storyteller, whose plots move as relentlessly as those of the best thrillers, yet his prose is elegant and full of literary allusions' A. Alvarez, Sunday Times `Stone's fifth and finest novel is about going to sea and the difficulty of trying to find a way back again . . . if one half of Stone's characters live their secret, interior lives apart from society, then the other half are desperately looking for their own ways out: drugs, murder, revolution, betrayal, infidelity . . . and, in the case of Owen Browne in Outerbridge Reach, sailing off the map of the world and mind altogether' Scot Bradfield, Independent `Its themes are contemporary and touched with cruelty . . . The toughness of Stone's novels has been readily accepted as on the surface; but there's an inner toughness of judgement that, when one stubs one's toe on it, is even more impressive' Robert M. Adams, New York Review of Books