Get Me Out of Here - Softcover

Sutton, Henry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609450078 ISBN 13: 9781609450076

Publisher: Europa Editions, 2011

Synopsis

This dark satire about an entitled young banker in a downward spiral is “a very modern and thoroughly haunting piece of work” (The Sunday Telegraph).

It’s 2008 and Matt Freeman is living in London, desperately trying to keep a toehold in the financial world by running a shadow banking business with contacts in North Korea and Iran. He is furious with the emptiness and impermanence of twenty-first century life―but addicted to the allure of luxury possessions: cars, watches, bespoke suits. And meanwhile, there is the question of why the women in Matt Freeman’s life seem to disappear.
Capturing one of the world’s financial capitals at a crucial moment, poised between extravagant excess and a terrifying recession, Get Me Out of Here is a satirical psychological thriller about the rage and desperation that come with the expectation of money for nothing. By turns darkly comic and unnerving, Sutton’s novel possesses a moral authority rare in contemporary fiction.

About this title

About the Author

Henry Sutton was born in Norfolk in 1963. He was literary editor of Esquire from 2002 to 2007 and has been the books editor of the Daily Mirror since 2001. He has published six novels, his first in 1995. Kids’ Stuff, his 2003 novel, was adapted for the stage.

Reviews

Sutton's unsettling psychosexual thriller effectively satirizes the post–financial crisis world, though its heavy debt to American Psycho mitigates some of its pleasures. The novel opens with a quotation from Kim Jong-Il, setting the tone for a no-holds-barred exposition of the flaws and foibles of Western society, as explicated by an unreliable narrator who runs a dodgy London banking business with operations in Pyongyang. Matt Freeman is a tweedy Patrick Bateman—though slightly less attractive and successful. Obsessed with sartorial elegance ("I wasn't going to be seen dead in a pair of Gap trousers"), exclusive restaurants, and younger women, Matt is, perhaps not surprisingly, revealed to have quite a nasty side as his uneasy facade crumbles and a series of crimes are committed against the women in his life with Matt looking ever more the likely culprit. Matt's fetishizing of material goods and appearances, and the possibility that he is an unhinged sexual deviant and sociopathic killer, will sound very familiar, and it's unfortunate that these shopworn elements are so prominent in what is otherwise a pretty great book, with Sutton's prose having an energy all its own, and Matt—despite his predestined unraveling—remaining sharp, funny, and nicely creepy. (June)

Edition details

• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1609450078
• ISBN 13: 9781609450076
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304