“'I am a camera," declared another poet in an autobiographical novel about a country in crisis. From the cabarets and the lodging houses, Christopher Isherwood recorded Germany's slouch towards nazism, and Isherwood's Berlin novels come to mind in reading The Last Hundred Days. But McGuinness knows that cameras lie and photographs can be doctored. With his view from the university and the nightclubs, he offers something more complicit and more sceptical about its own objectivity, a glimpse of the moment when Romania's cold war began to thaw.”
— James Purdon, The Observer
“The Last Hundred Days is an ambitious work, at ease with intimacy as well as with the sudden eruption of crowd scenes as the regime disintegrates and re-forms itself. It manages to be both funny and horrifying, sceptical but not fatally poisoned by the encounter. Above all, the sardonic crispness and evocative power of its language distinguishes it from the run of contemporary fiction.”
— Sean O'Brien, TLS
“The opening chapter is superb. McGuinness is an accomplished poet and writes with superb clarity. The novel is littered with aperçus that have the reader reaching for a pencil.”
— The Independent
“McGuinness's contribution is harsh and witty... The pessimism is invigorating, and Jilted City grows more powerful with each rereading.”
— The Guardian on Jilted City
“Drags you through the smoky backrooms of the dying days of Communist Romania. Funny, insightful and compelling.”
— Costa Prize Judges, 2011
“The descriptions are moments of total stillness in the book, and it's spellbinding.”
— We Love This Book
“Sinister, comic and lyrical, it vividly captures the end of a long nightmare.”
— The i
“I defy anyone not to revel in 350-odd pages of it at least.”
— Time Out, ****
The Last Hundred Days
Year
2011
Pages
377
Praise
“'I am a camera," declared another poet in an autobiographical novel about a country in crisis. From the cabarets and the lodging houses, Christopher Isherwood recorded Germany's slouch towards nazism, and Isherwood's Berlin novels come to mind in reading The Last Hundred Days. But McGuinness knows that cameras lie and photographs can be doctored. With his view from the university and the nightclubs, he offers something more complicit and more sceptical about its own objectivity, a glimpse of the moment when Romania's cold war began to thaw.”
— James Purdon, The Observer
“The Last Hundred Days is an ambitious work, at ease with intimacy as well as with the sudden eruption of crowd scenes as the regime disintegrates and re-forms itself. It manages to be both funny and horrifying, sceptical but not fatally poisoned by the encounter. Above all, the sardonic crispness and evocative power of its language distinguishes it from the run of contemporary fiction.”
— Sean O'Brien, TLS
“The opening chapter is superb. McGuinness is an accomplished poet and writes with superb clarity. The novel is littered with aperçus that have the reader reaching for a pencil.”
— The Independent
“McGuinness's contribution is harsh and witty... The pessimism is invigorating, and Jilted City grows more powerful with each rereading.”
— The Guardian on Jilted City
“Drags you through the smoky backrooms of the dying days of Communist Romania. Funny, insightful and compelling.”
— Costa Prize Judges, 2011
“The descriptions are moments of total stillness in the book, and it's spellbinding.”
— We Love This Book
“Sinister, comic and lyrical, it vividly captures the end of a long nightmare.”
— The i
“I defy anyone not to revel in 350-odd pages of it at least.”
— Time Out, ****
Description
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