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NOMINATED FOR THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
A CBC DAY 6 MUST-READ BOOK FOR SUMMER
A 49TH SHELF EDITOR’S PICK
Henry Banks, star of the UK’s most popular television series, has higher aspirations, ones befitting of his talent: a serious film career, beginning with a role in a brilliant Spanish director’s next movie. To make the jump to the big screen, he’ll have to remake himself in more than one way. But as he runs his morning miles and scrutinizes his changing physique in the mirror, he doesn’t know that he’s not alone in his obsession—Kristin, an unstable American fan, has her own ambitions. From the author of Man-Booker shortlisted The Quickening Maze, Dream Sequence is a moving depiction of desire and delusion and the unsettling consequences of fame.
Praise for Dream Sequence
“Everyone loves a good page-turner full of aspirational scene-setting, but few literary novelists dare to try it . . . [Dream Sequence] is a sexy, celeby drama . . . just like The Great Gatsby, this novel billows around you like a queasy dream, its grand scenery and awful characters combining to take us out of the real world and into another, oddly shimmering version of it.”
—The Times (London)
“Dream Sequence succeeds as a narrative thanks to Foulds’s prose. He doesn’t waste a single word, is frequently very funny, insightful and surprising. And he does a marvelous job of making us wonder who loves Henry the most, Kristin or Henry—and which of these possibilities is the most alarming consequence of celebrity.”
—New York Times Book Review
“The quality of the prose carries the book beyond conventions, as Mr. Foulds is able to conjure, with the unsettling immediacy of a person breathing against your neck, both Henry’s and Kristin’s private fixations and fantasies.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Adam Foulds is one of the best fiction writers working today. Dream Sequence possesses all the hallmarks of his previous books–emotional acuity, beautiful prose–and also a seductive plot and an ingenious structure. It’s a great novel. I read it practically in one sitting.”
—David Bezmozgis, author of the Giller-shortlisted The Free World
“Dream Sequence notices everything . . . Description is intimate and visceral, scratching at the glossy surface of the lives of the characters and underpinning the ‘vacuum’ they move through, together but apart . . . This is a novel of screens, of echoes and constant counterpoint, driven by changes in light as much as its reflective plot where matters of ‘acting’ are paramount … [a] shimmering novel.”
—Times Literary Supplement (TLS)
“What makes this pair so interesting isn’t the asymmetry of their relationship, but that deep down, they’re so similar . . . Both of these people channel their dissatisfaction with the present by living in a rich fantasy land of the future they imagine for themselves – to borrow the novel’s title, a dream sequence – albeit in different ways . . . Proverbial are the dangers of living in the past, but we rarely speak about the perils of living too much for what we imagine to come. Dream Sequence reminds readers to be present and to value what you have now.”
—The Globe and Mail
“[An] entertainingly skewering new novel about ambition and obsession.”
—Toronto Star
“[A] livewire exploration of sex and power.”
—Metro News
“An outstanding and unyielding exploration of celebrity, fame, and all its attendant obsessions…Foulds’s novel is fun, smart, and tense, part psychological drama about media-driven obsession and part razor-sharp social critique.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[Dream Sequence] is an exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on obsession . . . Foulds is proving himself to be a versatile writer of intelligence and charm.”
—The Spectator
“Precise and compressed language . . . while Henry’s precarious mix of insecurity and massive self-regard is sometimes played, effectively, for comedy, Foulds is also taking a serious look at contemporary identity and the alienating consequences of fame . . . terrifically good writing.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“The dream Adam Foulds weaves in this scintillating novel is gradually revealed, with grace and subtlety, to be an especially timely form of waking nightmare—but a nightmare so precise, and often beautiful, that one comes to prefer it, in some ways, to dull reality. Read this book.”
—John Wray, author of Godsend
“Adam Foulds’s fourth novel, Dream Sequence, is an exquisitely concocted, riveting account of artistic ambition and unrequited love verging on obsession . . . One finishes the book wishing the dream were longer.”
—Philip Womack, The Spectator
“Beautifully written . . . A novel about loneliness and obsession in contemporary life, set in hotels and airports, sterile apartment blocks, gyms and yoga classes.”
—Alice O’Keefe, New Statesman
“Entrancing language . . . Lyricism abounds throughout this deftly handled cautionary tale – one which warns that meeting our heroes can be dangerous and dreams can be frighteningly real.”
—Abu Dhabi National
“There’s deep psychology on every page . . . it’s the details of the writing itself—the precision of the word selection combined with the precision of the observation—that make for such enjoyable reading . . . Add to this keenness of perception a poetical ear for euphony and cadence and you have the quiddity of Foulds’s gift.”
—The Guardian
“[I]ncisively well-written and alluringly readable . . . Adam Foulds—whose previous work includes The Quickening Maze, about the poet John Clare’s incarceration in an Epping Forest asylum in the 1840s, and In the Wolf’s Mouth, set in North Africa and Sicily during the Second World War—is acutely sensitive to shifting environments, conveying them brilliantly with few words. This prose is truly poetic . . . Yet this novel also moves like a thriller, as these different vacancies, Henry and Kristin, collide in their desires. A terrific book about the realities and delusions of fame distorting the way we live now: not to be missed.”
—The Evening Standard
“[Foulds] has turned his keen attention to the present day, and the result is a book whose “thriller” label comes less from plot and more from the deepening unsettlement as Foulds turns the lights up on the derangements, both mundane and catastrophic, that drive both Henry and Kristin. As always with Foulds, though, the real star here is the writing, a delight at the smallest levels…An incisive and disquieting look at the consequences of fame.”
—Kirkus
“Foulds once again brings his psychological acuity to bear on characters bound within claustrophobic lives that they long to escape…[a] lucid, richly detailed and tense novel.”
—Financial Times
“Fresh and penetrating, flecked with original images…it’s hard not to take delicious pleasure in [Foulds’s] droll and sparkling prose.”
—Quill and Quire
“A little gem of a novel. Short, beautifully written, engaging characters and an exciting ending; what else could a reader ask for?…In only 180ish pages, we experience what it’s like to be famous, and what it’s like to be obsessed with someone famous…I loved this book.”
—I’ve Read This
Praise for Adam Foulds
“It has been a while since I have read a book as richly sown with beauty . . . A remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
“Adam Foulds writes like an angel about devilish things . . . He is fearsomely unafraid of the darkness within humans and the darkness they are capable of creating around them. The supple, sensuous beauty of his prose is bewitching: like the helpless children of Hamelin we follow wherever he chooses to lead, however horrifying the terrain, enchanted by the unstoppable flow of rich, unforgettable images.”
—Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times
”Foulds acknowledged mastery as a novelist and as a poet . . . is often apparent in this book: in the ambiguous dialogues between strangers revealing unspoken intimacies, in the delicately clipped snippets of everyday life recalled in the confusion of war, in the lyrical broken-up sentences that mirror the physical and mental shattering of the ongoing slaughter.”
—Alberto Manguel, The Guardian
“Adam Foulds is a young British novelist of striking talent and eclecticism. His style is first-rate, combining precision with a rich poetic imagination. He is able to do more with language, and at greater depth, than most other British novelists of his generation.”
—Andrew Holgate, The Sunday Times
“On the level of the sentence, there’s much to admire in this novel. Foulds has a searching eye for detail and an apparently helpless compulsion to wring imagery from his subject.”
—Tim Martin, The Telegraph
“Combining careful, considered prose with horrific realism, the latest from Foulds expertly renders the Allied campaigns in Italy and North Africa during WWII . . . readers will be amazed at this deeply felt, vivid novel.”
—Publishers Weekly (Pick of the Week)
“Foulds writes like no one else; while individual scenes are rendered with poetic simplicity, they fit together into an elliptical, complex plot readers will puzzle over long after finishing this novel.”
—Kirkus
“Electric . . . Mr. Foulds powerfully achieves what Stephen Crane called the ‘psychological portrayal of fear’ . . . fiercely memorable fiction.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“In the hands of award-winning poet Foulds, this combat narrative promises to remind us, via the revitalizing power of great writing, what war really feels and looks like.”
—Daniel Lefferts, Bookish.com
“Prose that flashes like the bullets and explosions it evokes.”
—Laurie Greer, Politics and Prose
“A harsh illumination of the broken mess that most war amounts to.”
—John Domini, Bookforum
“Combining careful, considered prose with horrific realism, the latest from Foulds expertly renders the Allied campaigns in Italy and North Africa during WWII.”
—Publishers Weekly (Pick of the Week)
