Sweet Sunday

A tumultuous novel about America's loss of innocence in the late Sixties.





Turner Raines is Mr Heartbreak. Everybody leaves him. They walk out, they run away... they die. When his oldest friend Mel Kissing dies with an ice pick through his skull, Raines picks up the thread and sets out to ask 'who?' and 'why?'





But this is America in 1969 and one death is just a drop in the ocean. The USA is about to land a man on the moon and the Vietnam War is ripping the country to pieces, setting sons against fathers, fathers against sons. The Woodstock festival is in full swing and Norman Mailer is standing as candidate for Mayor of New York.





Against this backdrop, Raines' questions take him back to the childhood home he left in Texas, back to the battered remains of his youth... and as his memory unravels, America unravels with it.



John Lawton worked for Channel 4 for many years, and, among many others, produced Harold Pinter's 'O Superman', the least-watched most-argued-over programme of the 90s. He has written seven novels in his Troy series, two Joe Wilderness novels, the standalone Sweet Sunday, a couple of short stories and the occasional essay. He writes very slowly and almost entirely on the hoof in the USA or Italy, but professes to be a resident of a tiny village in the Derbyshire Peak District. He admires the work of Barbara Gowdy, TC Boyle, Oliver Bleeck, Franz Schubert and Clara Schumann - and is passionate about the playing of Maria Joao Pires. He has no known hobbies, belongs to no organisations and hates being photographed.



A sprawling heartbreaker of a novel.



More than enough verve and wit to ensure happy page-turning wakefulness.



A terrific job... excellent at catching the mood of that hot summer of 1969 when the Vietnam War had divided families.



Sets the pulse racing and the jaded responses tingling.



Atmospheric... absorbingly intelligent.