Meantime
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Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Meantime
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Chris Reilly
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By:
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Frankie Boyle
About this listen
*FRANKIE BOYLE'S GRIPPING CRIME NOVEL: AN INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER *
'A dark and entertaining tranche of Glasgow noir . . . [A] deft, engaging thriller' Observer
'Full of scintillating sentences and perfect lines of dialogue' Sunday Times
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Glasgow, 2015. When Valium addict Felix McAveety's best friend Marina is found murdered in the local park, he goes looking for answers to questions that he quickly forgets. Felix enlists the help of a brilliant but mercurial GP; a bright young trade unionist; a failing screenwriter; semi-celebrity crime novelist Jane Pickford; and his crisis fuelled downstairs neighbour Donnie.
Their investigation sends them on a bewildering expedition that takes in Scottish radical politics, Artificial Intelligence, cults, secret agents, smugglers and vegan record shops.
Meantime is a picaresque detective story set against the backdrop of post-referendum Scotland. Frankie B
oyle's compelling debut novel is a tale of murder and revenge, and of personal and political loss.
'A darkest noir, unputdownable crime novel that swerves and surprises, with a gut-punch ending. I loved it!' Denise Mina, author of The Long Drop
'Inherent vices and scalpel-sharp jokes vie with a very human concern for those least garlanded in the rat race of life' Ian Rankin
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Critic reviews
"A gloriously funny mystery that bucks the 'cosy crime trend'... Peppered with one-liners, it reads Raymond Chandler in Glasgow... Boyle regularly deploys the beautifully offbeat imagery that characterises the best of his stand-up." (Telegraph)
"A surprisingly moving and beautiful journey through one man's shitshow of a friend's death / hangover." (Lucy Prebble, executive producer and writer of Succession)
Phenomenal.
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Like Chandler, his descriptions are vivid, unvarnished and often hilarious, using a no nonsense pros style that belies the eloquence and flare Boyle has with language. Also, like Chandler, he has a flawed but compelling realist detective, seeing the world (and coping with it) through a prism of drugs. Where Philip Marlowe drank heavily in every other scene, Felix, our protagonist, self medicates with every substance imaginable. And, like Chandler’s LA, Boyle’s Glasgow is a menagerie of highly entertaining, well drawn and compelling characters of every imaginable background; from government spooks to terminal novelists, from corrupted cops to doctors with god complexes, they’re all here.
The surprise for me was not Boyle’s facility with language, nor his ability to tell a cracking mystery story. It was his capacity to move me to tears of empathic grief, set alongside his ability to make me guffaw at absurd yet truthful humour, without jarring me and, somehow, making it all feel appropriate.
In the same way that I fell in love with Philip Marlowe’s journey from 1939 to 1959, I want to see if Felix has any more adventures in him. I do hope so.
Genuinely the best detective novel of this century so far, to be rated alongside John Le Carre or Cormac McCarthy for Boyle’s capacity to capture truths within fiction and to distil it into an addictive cocktail, not for the faint hearted.
Fans of Boyle will get it immediately. But there’s a much wider audience out there which I hope this book will reach. This could be the start of a brilliant fiction writer’s career?
Frankie Hard Boyled May Cause Addiction
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From Scotland's Jesus to Scotland's agatha Christi
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Super Read
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many good lines
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