Description
Book SynopsisYoung and penniless, Kif Kehlmann, is rung in the middle of the night by notorious con man and corporate criminal, Siegfried Heidl. About to go to trial for defrauding the banks of $700 million, Heidl proposes a deal: $10,000 for Kehlmann to ghostwrite his memoir in six weeks.
Kehlmann accepts but soon begins to fear that he is being corrupted by Heidl. Is he ghostwriting a memoir, or is Heidl is rewriting him? As the deadline draws closer everything that is certain grows uncertain as he begins to wonder: who is Ziggy Heidl - and who is Kif Kehlmann?
Trade ReviewFirst Person is both
comic and frightening. At times I caught a glimpse of Money-era Martin Amis in Flanagan’s satirical asides on the Australian publishing industry… And there’s a hint, too, of an epochal gloom that is redolent of the
The Great Gatsby. Yet there are also passages touched with the
virtuosity that shone so brightly in
The Narrow Road that are pure Flanagan… Studded with
sharp, breath-catching observations about the finite nature of life -- Carl Wilkinson * Financial Times *
The novel, with its switch backing recollections and cyclical dialogue, its penetrating scenes of birth and, eventually, death, is
enigmatic and
mesmerizing * The New Yorker *
Perhaps the most prodigal account of writer’s block ever written… Despite some sprightly satirical sallies, mostly about publishing,
First Person is a serious treatment of important modern issues (corporate corruption, exploitation of trust, the impudent dismissal of truth) -- David Grylls * Sunday Times *
A black comedy about the unreliability of memory and the warped values of modern publishing... the beauty of
First Person is the way it blossoms into a much richer novel than that outline scenario suggests....
readable and thought-provoking -- Max Davidson * Mail on Sunday *
A dark, occasionally demented book, that is
as unsettling as it is inspired -- Miranda Collinge * Esquire UK *
