The Ruins, Mat Osman
The Ruins, Mat Osman
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The Ruins

Author: Mat Osman

Narrator: Mat Osman

Unabridged: 13 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Repeater

Published: 06/01/2021

Synopsis

An extraordinary novel about the ubiquitous mysteries of family, memory and music.

London, 2010: Icelandic volcanoes have the city in gridlock, banks topple like dominoes and Brandon Kussgarten has been shot dead by gunmen in Donald Duck masks. His death draws his twin brother — shy, bookish Adam — into Brandon's underworld of deceit and desire.

A miniature kingdom sprouts in a Notting Hill tower-block, LA mansions burn in week-long parties, and in a Baroque hotel suite a record is being made that could redeem its maker even as it destroys him. As Adam begins to fall for his brother's shattered family he finds that to win them for himself he'll have to lose everything that he holds dear.
This intelligent, intriguing and emotionally-searing tale of fractured identities, narcissism and ambition questions how being loved for what others think we are differs from who we are to ourselves.

With echoes of Performance, The Talented Mr Ripley and Mulholland Drive, The Ruins delves into the dark heart of fame: magic, music and murder.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Inge

The Ruins is a novel exploring the possible fluidity of identity, with a twin brother quickly learning how to navigate life’s unpredictability in order to survive. And if fiction is like real life with the dull bits taken out, readers can brace themselves for this dazzling journey, as Osman’s charac......more

Goodreads review by William

An unexpected pleasure. A baroque thriller mystery featuring a forgotten rock star and his hermit twin brother and a trail of strange clues that draws in a nice slice of music history. Shades of John Connolly, Neal Stephenson and Jeff Noon in this sometimes densely labyrinthine book. There’s a tende......more

Goodreads review by Caroline

The Ruins has its readers hooked from its stand-out first line to the very last page. I have taken so much from this novel and will be thinking about it and it’s characters for days to come (at least). The novel explores identity and the blurring of the lines between person and persona, as well as t......more

Goodreads review by Mark

In the words of Orwelll: "decorative adjectives and humbug generally." This could have easily lost 100/150 pages and not lost any of the 'plot.' Lots of sentences that made me wince such as this one - "The lyrics coursed through me like a fever now. I was a husk driven by disease. A vase of dead flo......more

Quotes

"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

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