Description

“A dark and beguiling meditation on the weight of being…so fresh it practically pings with energy…The Bird Room is seamlessly woven into a perfectly formed whole that fizzes with deadpan wit and cutting one-liners.” —The Independent

An audacious and self-assured debut novel, The Bird Room by Chris Killen is sometimes darkly comic, sometimes painfully dramatic, and always entirely engaging. Reminiscent of other up-and-coming authors such as Tao Lin, Richard Milward, and Toby Litt, and with a spare and efficient style that belies the intricacies of the novel’s double narrative, The Bird Room is a dark, edgy tale of sex, love, and obsession.

About the Author

Chris Killen is a Writing Fellow at the University of Manchester and keeps a popular blog, Day of Moustaches (dayofmoustaches.blogspot.com). He lives in Manchester, England, and The Bird Room is his first novel.

Praise For…

“A postmodern world of troubled comic virtuality. . . . The Bird Room x-rays the souls of young people.” — The Guardian

“A darkly stylish black comedy of sexual manners. . . . His odd, downbeat characters engage in the kind of sex that makes you feel as if your soul needs a wash. . . . Taut, sharp prose . . . that gives an edgy, sometimes creepy, and very contemporary sense of beauty to the everyday and banal.” — Metro London

“Killen has fun playing with identities in a manner that brings to mind David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive.” — The Sunday Herald (UK)

“Killen creates something memorable out of his everyday ingredients. Clever time shifts keep the reader on their toes. . . . [with] darkly funny observations about contemporary urban life his spare, powerful prose brilliantly captures the loneliness of cities and the agonies of love.” — The London Paper

“A disturbing and uncomfortably bleak comedy full of existential angst, emotional self-destruction, and a lot of deviant and frequently depressing sex....a postmodern take of the traditional love-triangle tale, with a bit of sadomasochism and paranoia thrown in.” — The Herald (Scotland)

“Chris Killen’s writing surprised me sometimes and made me think ‘that is funny’ sometimes and I never felt bad reading it because I knew (by reading the sentences) that he had worked hard on being sincere, concise, and interesting.” — Tao Lin, author of Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed

“An extremely engaging combo of sex, melancholy and killer one-liners—The Bird Room is a beautiful Chinese puzzle of a novel.” — Toby Litt, author of Hospital and Ghost Story

“The Bird Room is amazing. Beautiful, laconic, and chockablock with uneasy sex—like having a threesome with your girlfriend and Richard Brautigan.” — Richard Milward, author of Apples and Ten Storey Love Song

“An astonishingly good first novel. I was gripped from the first page.” — M.J. Hyland, author of Carry Me Down

“A strangely merry look at the agony of true love.” — Dazed & Confused

“Either disturbingly brilliant or brilliantly disturbing. Whichever, I loved it.” — Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts

“Killen has taken a rough stone and polished it into a gem. A book that succeeds in turning daily banality into a thing of great beauty.” — Ewan Morrison, author of The Last Book You Read and Swung