Dream Sequence

December 1, 2018

Made famous by the The Grange, a soapy television series, Henry wants to play the big screen and may be headed there with an offer from a distinguished Spanish auteur. New divorcée Kristin clings lovingly to his TV image and every scrap of social media data about him. A story of stalking from one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and a brilliant poet to boot.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2019
A London actor is pursued by an obsessed American fan.Kristin is alone. Her house in Pennsylvania no longer bears any traces of her businessman ex-husband or her stepsons except for a small Spider-Man toy left behind by the youngest boy. But rather than feeling lonely, she fills her inner life with Henry Banks, a British actor featured prominently in a Downton Abbey-esque period drama called The Grange. Of Henry, Kristin rhapsodically thinks, "He was the key signature in which the music of her life was played." Believing Henry is her "twin soul," Kristin handwrites him fan letters and plots a trip across the ocean to engineer an encounter with him. Henry, too, cultivates his own obsessions, namely snagging the lead role in the upcoming film by genius director Miguel García, a move that should catapult him into the same realm as "Benedict Cumberbatch or Tom Hiddleston." In the meantime, he moves with affable narcissism through film festivals, drug-fueled parties, and sex with models, unaware of the collision course he is on with Kristin. For the first time since his debut novel, Foulds (In the Wolf's Mouth, 2014, etc.) 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--as when Henry is "simplified inside the diagram of his suit"--and the larger, pinning down with a kind of otherworldly skill at observation the lengths to which people will go for acceptance.An incisive and disquieting look at the consequences of fame.

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Starred review from March 25, 2019
The latest from Foulds (In the Wolf’s Mouth) is an outstanding and unyielding exploration of celebrity, fame, and all its attendant obsessions. Kristin is recently divorced and living alone in the Philadelphia home she once shared with her ex-husband, who’s since moved on to his third marriage. The one thing that gives her joy in “her new, ruined life” is the British TV show The Grange and its irrepressibly handsome star Henry Banks. In London, Henry has no idea Kristin exists and is eager to move on from the small screen. Between starving himself into the kind of ugliness necessary for the lead role in an acclaimed Spanish director’s new movie and partying with models and rich heirs in Qatar, Henry’s star is rising and he is about to launch into the highest stratosphere of fame. Kristin’s infatuation with Henry, meanwhile, becomes an obsession, and she boards a flight to London to try to get as close to him as she can. When Kristin and Henry’s paths cross, to devastating effect, Kristin must contend with the dissonance between the reality of Henry and her fantasies of him. Foulds’s novel is fun, smart, and tense, part psychological drama about media-driven obsession and part razor-sharp social critique.

May 1, 2019
It might be difficult to sympathize with Henry Banks, a lascivious Casanova who uses and discards women with ease, but the reader comes to view the English actor as a clinical case study in celebrity vacuity. As the accomplished television star lusts after the lasting security he thinks will come with juicier cinematic roles, at the other end of the playing field is Henry's psychotic American fan. Kristin is convinced she and the handsome actor have a future together after a mere minute's worth of interaction at an airport years ago. Foulds (In the Wolf's Mouth, 2014) sets up these two isolated planets on a dangerous collision course. Above all, it is the brilliant writing?his Dad's play reminds Henry of a Christmas cake, the unpleasant richness of dried fruit, glac� cherries and alcohol and icing, traditional, festive, indigestible; a man is described as the sort of dumb and nasty that thinks it's smart ?that truly scores in this mordant story about loneliness in a globalized world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)