Monday, September 20, 2010

What is Toby Ball reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Toby Ball, author of The Vaults, his first novel.

His entry begins:
I am currently reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell, and it is tremendous. I don't generally read very much "literary fiction," but a cousin gave me this book as a present and I'd heard a number of people whose opinions I value recommend Cloud Atlas, also by Mitchell. Briefly, it is the story of a Dutch clerk who travels to Nagasaki around the turn of the 19th century to root out corruption in the Dutch East India Company outpost there. I really love this book. The writing is wonderful without calling attention to itself and the relationships between...[read on]
Among the early praise for The Vaults:
“(An) impressive thriller debut…. The plot steamrolls to a dramatic conclusion. Ball’s “City,” in which despair and graft are almost palpable, is an imaginative achievement on par with Loren Estleman’s Gas City.”
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“If George Orwell and Dashiell Hammett had ever decided to collaborate on a book, they might have come up with something like The Vaults … superbly plotted, stylishly written and entirely unique.”
--Michael Harvey, author of The Third Rail, The Chicago Way and The Fifth Floor

The Vaults – like a dark dream you can’t shake off upon waking — is stunning. With a Kafka-esque view filtered through a Jasper Fforde lens, Toby Ball gives us the gray terror of Any City in Any Unnamed Year that could reach from 1930 to today, and reminds us, once again, of the importance of vigilance and the danger of Big Boss rule. Masterfully created.”
--Louise Ure, Shamus Award-winning author of Liars Anonymous
Visit Toby Ball's website and blog.

Writers Read: Toby Ball.

--Marshal Zeringue