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by Dan Rhodes
This is Life is a missing baby mystery and an enchanted Parisian adventure. Hand in hand with lovable heroine Aurelie Renard, you will see life as you've never seen it before, discover the key to great art, witness the true cost of love, and learn how all these things may be controlled by the in-breath of a cormorant. Chock-full of charming characters and hilarious set-pieces this is a hugely enjoyable novel that will make you see life anew.
"Starred Review. Often comic and sometimes tragic, readers will be immersed in these characters, each with a different rhythm; even the least significant of supporting players are brought to life." - Publishers Weekly
"Over the last decade Rhodes's fiction has grown darker and more nightmarish, but This Is Life is his farewell to tragedy. It is a happy book about love, from the author of the lacerating short story collection Don't Tell Me the Truth about Love (the epigraph came from Iago's speech inviting us to 'Drown cats and blind puppies'). Is he now telling us the truth about love? Or has he become sentimental? It is remarkable indeed for characters in a Dan Rhodes novel to get to the point where "everything was as wonderful as they had known it would be". So love is triumphant; and justice, too, predominates. Even baby 'Air-bear', when fortuitously reunited with his mother, loses his italics and regains the romantic dignity of his real name, Olivier." - The Guardian (UK)
"The result is a comic confection perfectly suited to lulling even the most cynical into willingly suspending disbelief, and you soon find yourself overlooking the high tally of improbabilities and coincidences. You even start relishing the fact that it is similar in tone to Amélie, and just like that film it is irresistible: quality froth infused with restrained comic irony, some very nice touches of dark humour and one or two genuinely arresting moments." - The Telegraph (UK)
"This is Life is a true mélange of talk, action, lust and performance art that moves at a fairly furious, if scatty, pace. A subplot involving a gun doesn't come together quite as nicely as other bits do, but the novel has many charms – even if you've got to tolerate a bit of lunacy in order to keep up. As one character muses, 'maybe there was something to be said for a little bit of disorder after all'. Especially when you've also got true love, true friendship and an inventive joie de vivre." - The Independent (UK)
This information about This Is Life was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dan Rhodes was born in 1972. He is the author of six other books: Anthropology, Don't Tell Me the Truth About Love, Timoleon Vieta Come Home, Gold, Little Hands Clapping and, writing as Danuta de Rhodes, The Little White Car. In 2003 he was named by Granta magazine as one of their Twenty Best of Young British Novelists and in 2010 by the Daily Telegraph as one of their Best British Novelists Under Forty. He is the winner of many awards including the Author's Club First Novel Award and the E.M. Forster Award. He lives in Derbyshire.
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