Available from Crown/Three Rivers Press Books for $14.00 |
What they’re saying about Slipstream: “Larson’s exciting, touching, and impressive debut thriller . . . makes you want to know more. . . . Captures the dark side of a glittering city like Los Angeles.” “Larson is a master of details, coloring in her precise and increasingly jittery scene with tight specificity: the squeaking of car tires in a mall parking garage, the chipped paint on the mammoth dioramas at the La Brea tar pits. . . . Larson deftly steers her characters along a collision course, piling up twists and turns along the way. When the climax does arrive, it destabilizes all our expectations—yet offers a hopeful glimpse of stability on the rocky horizon.” “Over four rain-soaked weeks, five downtrodden Los Angelenos, each grappling with a life-altering crisis, intersect each other's lives amid the empty bustle of LAX. . . . Larson’s exquisitely calibrated prose makes clear she knows these people to their bones.” “Larson is a deft storyteller. Her prose is fast-paced and edgy, racing toward the book's conclusion like a 747 barreling down a runway. Her characters are well-drawn . . . and her portrayal of Los Angeles is palpably noirish and gritty.” “This remarkably accomplished first novel by California writer Leslie Larson looks at the intersection of the lives of five people who are ordinary but unforgettable. . . . An extremely good read.” “An accomplished first novel.” “A gripping debut that successfully builds upon post-9/11 fears while feverishly mining the depths of human desire.” “A gently paced thriller that lingers over the human side, then builds toward the inevitable climax, but not until every sub-strand is tucked in. It’s a rich and wonderful novel.” “Larson writes with an intimate eye and heart about citizens so familiar to the American landscape, we don't even see them. A story told while we are living in the ‘United States of Fear,’ Slipstream is about the search for the safety of home. Larson has honored the lives of the working-class by telling their version of our times.” "Larson writes an observant, easy-moving, sea-level prose, honest to the core, and this instrument allows her to slip out of the head of one character and move directly into the head of another It takes enormous discipline to write this way, as well as an unshakable confidence in one's capacity fully to inhabit one's characters. Each character is brought vividly into wriggling, yammering life by Ms. Larson's unerring talent. Slipstream demands to be read from start to finish, if at all possible in one long, shivering gulp." “Slipstream is a genuinely startling novel that caught me up in the lives of people used to being looked past, over, or beyond. Larson’s people are alive on the page, and they pulled me along with them as things got scarier and scarier until… Well, you have to read the book to learn that—and trust me, it will be worth it.” "As Leslie Larson reminds us in this brilliant novel, everyone in L.A. is just three degrees of separation from the next small apocalypse." "This exceptional first novel is pitch perfect in its authentic, insightful portrayals of fatefully intersecting lives amid the edgy anxiety of our post 9-11 world. The writing is pure pleasure—as clean and clear as glass." “Leslie Larson's Slipstream tracks five protagonists on collision course, but for all its deft plotting and effective suspense, it's most memorable for its portraits of characters negotiating the difference between just getting by and moving forward. Larson renders beautifully a lower middle class California that's being squeezed out of a place to live: that forgotten group consigned to stained carpets and banged-up walls, gouged floors and the smell of other people's lives, and houses that are ‘more like dentist's offices, banquet rooms, tool sheds.’ Slipstream provides an intricate and moving sense of the way in which such characters' lives go wrong, and the persistence of their resolve to turn them around.” “In Leslie Larson's novel Slipstream, the question is not why we leave but that we leave again and again, each time set against the incredible drama of our surreal lives. She inhabits her sharp, incisive, smart novel with lives we know and know of, sometimes too closely, lives that begin and begin again and seem to end and end again. Departures and arrivals amidst the terror of our daily chaos.”
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© Leslie Larson, 2006. |
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