Talk Talk - Hardcover

Boyle, T.C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670037702 ISBN 13: 9780670037704

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2006

Synopsis

Having fallen completely in love with hearing-impaired Dana, Bridger is unable to believe her guilty of charges ranging from assault to auto theft and discovers that a man named Peck Wilson has been living a life of criminal excess at Dana's expense. By the author of Drop City. 80,000 first printing.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Praise for TALK TALK by T.C. Boyle

"T.C. Boyle's Talk Talk starts off fast and never let's go - and that's fun...Boyle once again delivers an entertaining story with his usual laser commentary - about the way we identify ourselves and the role language plays."
-USA Today

"His most exciting novel yet...Boyle's new novel about identity theft is so perfectly aligned with the day's news that the FBI should search his house for stolen credit cards. Talk Talk grabs hold of the fragile structures that establish who we are and what we own and shakes them apart...Boyle knows how to drill down through the surface of everyday life into our core anxieties, and he knows how to write constantly charging, heart-thumping chase scenes...Boyle begins with the merely bureaucratic elements of identity, but soon he teases out the more profound ramifications of who we are and how we prove it...The current perils of Internet security give Talk Talk a timely hook, but there's nothing ephemeral about the novel."
-The Washington Post, front page

"By now Boyle possesses the unparalleled ability to create characters who can do far more than amuse. In fact, they're so absolutely human that they're annoying - in the way that humans are...He's sweating not to make us sympathize with his creatures but to make us comprehend them. He lavishes his prodigious - and prodigiously humane - gifts on how they are, not who they are...Boyle, though sheer empathic power, seems to have wormholed into the parallel universe of the deaf...it's not just the road but the scenery where the author marches out his chops. No character is too small to lavish with peculiar splendor...Suffice it to say that Talk Talk stands out as nothing short of an uncomfortable masterpiece - as simultaneously overwhelming, treacherous, beautiful and boiling over with hellacious revelation as its ultimate subject: life in twentieth-century America."
-Los Angeles Times, front page

"His least discursive, most tautly paced book to date, a tense thriller about a couple's ill-advised, cross-country pursuit of a 21st-century scourge: a dangerous identity thief. Talk Talk opens at full throttle and never slackens...a rage so intense that it overtakes reason runs through the book like a superhighway."
-San Francisco Chronicle, front page

"The outrageously talented T.C. Boyle loves nothing more than demolishing a charlatan, and his fabulously entertaining fiction is packed with megalomaniacs, hypocrites, and overbearing nincompoops who make life hell for the intelligent and sensible mensch. When Boyle finds the delicate balance between his over-the-top satirical impulses and his startling sentimentality, no American novelist can touch him...the novel flies along on the power of Boyle's propulsive and exquisitely perceptive prose."
-Entertainment Weekly

"Funny, engaging, and suspenseful...using his gift for manic invention and freewheeling, hyperventilated prose, Mr. Boyle does an antic job of recounting the cat-and-mouse-and-cat game played by Dana and Peck, wittily dancing around his theme of identity and identity theft, even as he orchestrates a sense of foreboding and suspense...he manages here to mix clever narrative pyrotechnics with real character development."
-The New York Times

"The normally extravagant T.C. Boyle tames himself in Talk Talk to deliver a chilling literary thriller. Or is it a horror story for our times?...Boyle has us in the fever grip of Peck's hostile takeover of Dana, the stealth attack of identity theft and the fear and fury it arouses."
-The New York Daily News

"Once again, Boyle examines a contemporary issue - identity theft - in very human terms with a very engaging story...Talk Talk is a good read for summer or any season. On a deeper level, though, it's much more, an examination of identity that evolves from a fast-paced chase to something far more satisfying. It's a novel you'll be likely to talk about for a long time."
-St. Louis Post Dispatch

"From its fast and fluid pace, Boyle's new novel, Talk Talk, might seem like so much entertainment chatter, but embedded within it is a meditation on the nature of communication and identity...his virtuosity at the quick-take description, and the slightly fevered feel of his prose, are on full display."
-New York Newsday

"An identity-theft thriller that will appeal even to John Grisham readers...and for those who like a little literary meat in their summer page-turners, Boyle's knack for nuanced and intelligent characterization and language hasn't deserted him here...Although it's difficult to put Talk Talk down once the chase begins, few readers will be able to make it past the first chapters without frantically heading to the Internet to learn how to obtain their annual credit reports from those agencies the sage people who write financial columns are always hounding us to contact."
-The Rocky Mountain News

"Boyle brings a hard boil to a contemporary conundrum...he writes with great immediacy, his characters constantly in a state of motion, agitation, and striving."
-The New York Post

"A dandy novel, complete with the timely subject of identity theft...Talk Talk rarely falters, the sentences sharp and the characters well defined."
-The Atlanta Constitution Journal

"However unpatriotic this attitude is, identity thieves scare me more than terrorists. Reading T.C. Boyle's stirring new novel reinforces that anxiety...this novel is truly and movingly more about identity than about theft."
-The Miami Herald

"In order to alleviate anxiety, I recommend readers run a quick credit check on themselves before they dig in...Boyle successfully draws the reader in, so that we feel the tension of Dana's isolation in her silent world...we sympathize with both the good guys and the bad guys. These world's collide in unexpected ways and make this book a thriller, a page-turner formed by a master's hand...Boyle writes with such authority it's a pleasure to bite your nails the whole way through."
-The Pittsburgh Post Gazette

"Talk Talk makes the lurking danger of identity theft a dizzying reality...A tricky novel of unlikely intimacies."
-O Magazine

"This time Boyle delivers a fast-paced, edge-of-your seat thriller, applying his mastery of language and characterization to the compulsively readable mode of the commercial suspense novel. He proves that he can master his literary chops to maintain the tension as well as any old pro of the genre...the great achievement of Talk Talk is the way the novel brings us into the moment-by-moment experience of its profoundly deaf central character. We feel and understand her every emotion and reaction."
-the Portland Oregonian

"If you are one of the 26.5 million veterans whose personal information was on that stolen laptop, stop reading right now. And under no circumstances should you buy Talk Talk, the latest novel by T.C. Boyle. The rest of us, though, will certainly enjoy the PEN-Faulkner Award winner's satirically clever take on that most modern of crimes, identity theft."
-The Christian Science Monitor

About the Author:

T. C. Boyle is the author of eleven novels, including World's End (winner of the PEN/FaulknerAward), Drop City (a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award), and The Inner Circle. His most recent story collections are Tooth and Claw and The Human Fly and Other Stories.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0670037702
• ISBN 13: 9780670037704
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352