Press Reviews

• Michael Moorcock

  One of our finest writers, Warner is an original, a school of fiction all his own. He has never been afraid to take risks with style or subject matter. His themes are as unique and substantial as his methods. You can always trust him for an absorbing story, a beautiful, oddly lyrical style, wonderful, memorable characters and great dialogue. I look forward to every new book from him with high expectations! He never disappoints

• Jenni Fagan

  Alan Warner is one of our best living writers, six years since his last novel came out and KITCHENLY 434 has the kind of pin-point precision in prose that has an hallucinatory realness to its ways. Stunning.'

• Martin Chilton

  INDEPENDENT

  A delightfully comic tale

• Jude Cook

  LITERARY REVIEW

  A compulsively enjoyable tale centred on the 1970s rock scene...stealthily comic...as well as deeply poignant

• Stephanie Cross

  DAILY MAIL

  Part farce, part elegy, part tragi-comically belated coming-of-age story, this is a pleasure from beginning to end

• Katie Goh

  THE SKINNY

  Kitchenly 434 is a biting, relentless and subtle deconstruction of a particularly English sensibility and a particularly masculine delusion. As funny as it is disturbing, this is Warner on top form

• Stuart Kelly

  THE SCOTSMAN

  Warner's work has always been intriguing and this, I feel, is his most ambitious and haphazard novel since The Man Who Walks. There is a strange echo of Nabokov, whose novels were similarly unreliable and designed as man-traps of a sort. The voice of Crofton, by turns lyrical, lachrymose and ludicrous, is a peculiar elegy. Flummoxed, yes, but the rose-tinted glasses are both rosy and deceptive in a queasily skilful manner

• Phil Baker

  THE SUNDAY TIMES

  Sliding from comedy to elegy to a final moment of redemption, this is a lovely, idiosyncratic book, canny and generous and full of life

• M John Harrison

  GUARDIAN

  A gleeful satire about owning and being owned - by places, people, ideas and economic systems . . . a gristly, enjoyably intractable book . . . If you want to know anything, indeed everything, about the general history of the music, Kitchenly 434 is your manual

• Arts Desk

  A novel in which This is Spinal Tap crashes into The Remains of the Day . . . it's a triumph and a treat

• Jamie Atkins

  RECORD COLLECTOR

  A beautifully observed, witty account of arrested development that sticks with you

• Neil Armstrong

  MAIL ON SUNDAY

  This very funny, occasionally disturbing, unpredictable novel is as densely layered as any prog-rock organ solo

• James Walton

  THE TIMES

  Impressively artful... the novel Kitchenly 434 most brings to mind is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day - albeit in stranger and ruder form... in best Remains of the Day style, the piercing character study at the book's heart is accompanied by a melancholy sense of an era ending. With the rise of punk, Fear Taker are no longer an all-conquering force - and with the election of Margaret Thatcher the glory days of Seventies bohemianism seem numbered too.

• Benjamin Myers

  Set in an electric Eden of an England that briefly allowed guitar heroes to reinvent themselves as aristocrats almost overnight, Kitchenly 434 is as absurd, beguiling, ridiculous, excessive and comical as the pompous rock stars of the 1970s whose planets this unique novel orbits, and the likes of which we may never see again. Few novels about not much have ever been quite so compelling