'Compulsively readable novel informed by suspense that is, at times, breathtaking. The setting is beautifully realized not only by its evocation of place, but also by its myriad references to popular music of the day. Sometimes horrifying, sometimes nostalgic and even poignant, Ellis' latest is an unqualified success' - Booklist
'A brooding noir thriller blending fact and fiction ... an event publication from a cult author' - The Bookseller, Editor's Choice
'A thrilling fusion of classic crime noir, pop culture porn and new wave gloss,The Shards is the pinnacle of Bret Easton Ellis' creative career and everything we have come to hope, expect and fear from him' - Benjamin Myers
'There's inevitable excitement surrounding a new Bret Easton Ellis. The Shards is a riotous tale of privilege and psychosis at a swanky prep school' - Guardian
'One of the biggest literary events of 2023 ... The author of American Psycho returns in characteristic, high-octane, disturbing style, weaving a heavily fictionalised retelling if his own days at prep school in 1981. Character driven, yet typical of the cult writer's twisted imagination, the novel focuses on a hero who must navigate his own desires and paranoias as a serial killer lingers around campus. Welcome back, Mr Easton Ellis' - Harper's Bazaar
'A tale of sexed-up, drug-guzzling privileged high school students in the early 1980s ...Glossy and grotesque' - The Times
'The Shards isn't just Ellis's strongest novel since the 90s, it's a full-spectrum triumph, incorporating and subverting everything he's done before and giving us, if we follow the book's ingenious, gleefully self-aware conceit, nothing less than the Ellis origin story' - Sam Byers, Guardian
'Few writers in recent decades have created a self-contained world as distinct as Bret Easton Ellis has ... Like the characters, the reader is first numbed, later satisfied, finally a little drunk with it all ... It takes us back to our discovery of his daring world, a time that then seemed dangerous but now seems innocent. In this context, reading it is a strange, sobering and moving experience' - John Self, Financial Times
'The Shards reads like a Karl Ove Knausgard novel spliced with a Dario Argento movie ... The Shards is an inspired 1980s fever dream of a book, nostalgic and lustful and ecstatic, as well as a loving act of pop-cultural conservation ... what a charm to find that The Shards is as vital as anything he's ever written - and it's the one all the other BEE novels are about' - Rob Doyle, Guardian
'It's Ellis's definitive work: his own origin story' David Sexton, The Times
'It is lurid, grisly, violent, sexy, explicit, ambiguous, chill, funny, sad, and creepy, and so perfectly Bret Easton Ellis-y that at times it flirts with self-parody - which, one suspects, is very much the idea. It's hard to avoid the cliched poster-quote: if you like Bret Easton Ellis novels you'll love this ... The Shards perhaps represents a new genre: true crime fiction ... [it] is queasily gripping, strikingly heartfelt, and a whole lot of fun. The novel does not deserve to be overlooked' - Alex Bilmes, Esquire
'This is an author who will shock, befuddle and haunt you, with the odd laugh-out-loud absurdity along the way' - Crime Fiction Lover
'A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish, scary new story that doesn't disappoint' - Town and Country Magazine
Praise for Bret Easton Ellis:
'A writer of real American genius' - GQ
'A rebel whose work is controversial precisely because its sinister themes are so dexterously written' - Sunday Telegraph
'One of the most gifted and serious novelists working in America today' - Financial Times
'A master stylist with hideously interesting new-fangled manners and the heart of an old-fashioned moralist' - Observer
'A living embodiment of how, between the pre-digital world of 1985 and today, both everything and nothing has changed. And it's been Ellis's life's work to make us confront the absurdity of that world in all its grimness, comedy and plastic beauty' - New York Times
'If Joan Didion is the California ice queen who picked apart the increasingly threadbare fabric of 70s American society, then Bret Easton Ellis is her heir apparent' - Vanity Fair
'There is no doubt that Ellis retains the ability to startle and disquiet' - TLS
'One of those authors who leaves no one - whether or not they've read him - indifferent' - The Times
'Bret is the signal artist of the present day ... he's the genius or outlaw we don't want to claim or own up to, maybe even wish didn't exist. But whatever your view of him is-major novelist, minor fool, virtuoso, villain, prodigy, provocateur, pissant-he must be recognised as the key to cracking the code of American pop culture for the last forty years. His work is an x-ray of the society that produced him. He edits our past, just as he plots out our future' - Lily Anolik
