The Ruins

Praise

“There’s a touch of Pynchon in this complex, woozily dream-like novel about music, mystery and imagined worlds…” 
— Ian Rankin

“The Ruins reads like Raymond Chandler remixed by James Lasdun: barbed aperçus and killer images flare across each page, even as unsettling elements moil below, in pursuit of more sinister ambitions.  Every great noir tale is at some level a fantasia on the slipperiness of identity; Osman has written a great noir tale.”
— Martin Seay, author of The Mirror Thief

“The Ruins is an intriguing and beautifully-written tale of two brothers, filled with music and danger. But at its heart this is a novel about being restless and lonely; about how the inability to create something transient leads to a silent despair and the desire to be someone else.”
— Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire

“Oozes quiet sedition.”
— Sukhdev Sandhu, author of Night Haunts

“The Ruins is such a brilliant and idiosyncratic thing. It’s hectic, soulful, elegant, and wickedly clever. It somehow approximates the immersive experience of listening to a life-changing album, and it also has some of the best line-by-line prose I’ve read in a really long time.” 
— Anna Smaill, The Chimes 

“The debut from Suede founding member and bassist Mat Osman is an altered state of a novel, mixing the crime of LA noir, the ambient cityscapes of JG Ballard and dark language games of Thomas Pynchon, all imbued with a sensitivity to the magical – and powerful – properties of making and listening to music.” — George Chesterton, GQ

“Fantastic debut novel. Magical, surreal, disturbing. Reminded me in places of early Iain Banks and DBC Pierre” — John Niven

“Redolent of The Talented Mr Ripley, Performance and Theodore Roszak’s Flicker, spanning London, LA and Las Vegas, The Ruins by Suede guitarist Mat Osman contains multitudes; it has all the makings of a cult classic.” - Irish Times