Description
In Jonathan Dee’s elegant and explosive new novel, Sugar Street, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road with a large sum of cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat.
Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he meets a city where his past is unlikely to track him down.
Renting a room from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions, he seems to have escaped his former self.
But can he?
In a story that moves with swift dark humour and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator’s attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence.
Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self – simplicity, kindness, above all invisibility – grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbours in their politically divided working-class city.
With the suspense of a crime thriller and the grace of our best literary fiction, Dee unspools the details of our unlikely hero’s former life and his developing new one in a drumbeat roll up to a shocking final act.
‘A deft punch of a novel from Jonathan Dee…[he] creates a true page-turner out of simple materials and the result is a troubling and stimulating look at real American life – at the fix that materialism plus the information state has got us into. It’s also very funny’ – George Sanders
