DREAM SEQUENCE ADAM FOULDS

Jonathan Cape, 224pp, £14.99

Adam Foulds is a difficult-tocategorise writer whose previous novels include the Bookershortlisted The Quickening Maze, about Victorian poets Clare and Tennyson, and The Broken Word, a verse novella about the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya. Dream

Sequence is another kettle again, a fast-moving farce which slips down in a couple of hours about a narcissistic English actor on the cusp of huge success and a sketchily drawn American divorcee in the grip of a delusion about the actor, born of an immersion in a Downton- type soap in which he stars combined with a chance encounter at an airport. Matt Rowland Hill in the Literary

Review relished ‘the way Foulds inhabits his characters’ solipsism with imaginative sympathy’. But he warned that it was ‘not a warm or consoling book. A lesser writer might have been content to reap from its subject the low-hanging fruit of edification or satire. But Foulds, in sentence after perfect sentence, has created something altogether more strange: an acid, amoral tale of hunger and haunting.’

In the Evening Standard David Sexton described Dream Sequence as ‘a really good London novel’. He also praised it as ‘a terrific book about the realities and delusions of fame distorting the way we live now: not to be missed’. Not according to Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times, who praised Foulds’s previous work while dismissing this novel as feeble, evidence of a powerful talent lapsing into sleep-mode – ‘the story is about as gripping as an empty glove’.