Outerbridge Reach

A tough, elegant, alarming novel. Stone writes superbly about the sea, about fear and loneliness, about life in extremis . . . In Outerbridge Reach, he has produced what I believe will come to be recognized as a quintessential novel of the Reagan era, along with Updikes Rabbit at Rest and Don DeLillos Mao II John Banville, Guardian Stone has already written two of the best novels of the past twenty years, Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise. Outerbridge Reach makes it three . . . He is a great storyteller, whose plots move as relentlessly as those of the best thrillers, yet his prose is elegant and full of literary allusions A. Alvarez, Sunday Times Stones fifth and finest novel is about going to sea and the difficulty of trying to find a way back again . . . if one half of Stones characters live their secret, interior lives apart from society, then the other half are desperately looking for their own ways out: drugs, murder, revolution, betrayal, infidelity . . . and, in the case of Owen Browne in Outerbridge Reach, sailing off the map of the world and mind altogether Scot Bradfield, Independent Its themes are contemporary and touched with cruelty . . . The toughness of Stones novels has been readily accepted as on the surface; but theres an inner toughness of judgement that, when one stubs ones toe on it, is even more impressive Robert M. Adams, New York Review of Books