Lost souls

Book Description

Critics

• 'Lost Souls' by Michael Collins

  Into this "crouched, grand, sad and burned out landscape" dotted with factories, shopping malls, dilapidated motels and highways, Lawrence, a divorced policeman, discovers the body of a three-year-old girl lying face down in a pile of autumn leaves b ... (read full critics)

  readingmatters published on Tue, 28 Sep 2010

• Lost Souls

  Shotsmag Reviews - Lost Souls by Michael Collins Gwen Moffat’s day job was rock climbing and she broke moulds. As the first woman guide she carved a niche in the macho world of professional mountaineering; as a crime writer she specialises in wild c ... (read full critics)

  shotsmag published on Mon, 27 Sep 2010

1 Review

• 

  Depressing, but very good

  To be totally honest this is probably a lot darker than some “dark” genre books are, and its main target is ordinary people. The main protagonist, I’m not going to call him a hero, is Lawrence, a policeman who discovers a 3 year old’s body on the road. It looks like a hit and run, but it isn’t that ... (continue)

  To be totally honest this is probably a lot darker than some “dark” genre books are, and its main target is ordinary people. The main protagonist, I’m not going to call him a hero, is Lawrence, a policeman who discovers a 3 year old’s body on the road. It looks like a hit and run, but it isn’t that simple and pretty soon there are cover-ups and more murders. But it isn’t really the death that makes this dark and depressing, more the situation that Lawrence finds himself in. He is divorced, can’t afford his alimony payments, becomes a pawn in a larger game that he knows nothing about, and there doesn’t really seem to be any way out for him.

  At times it is seems that it should be hard to empathise with our narrator. He does some very questionable things, but they are understandable, in a way, although you still wish he wouldn’t.

  The whole atmosphere of the novel is quite bleak. Hopeless would be a good way to describe it. And even when there are rare moments of joy they are soon tempered by further loss. Not one to read if you are feeling depressed I think.

  But if you aren’t then there are plenty of reasons to read it. Yes it is depressing, but the writing is excellent, Collins does a great job of using Lawrence and his brutally honest opinions and thoughts to make the reader appreciate just how failed this nameless midwestern American town is. He manages to come right out and say the things that we don’t really want to think about, that life can be pointless and pained and that maybe there is no light to show us the way out of whatever hole we have dug ourselves into. And at the same time it is an engrossing and readable story.

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  Dee said on Oct 23, 2007 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

Book Details

• Rating:
  (7)
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• English Books
• Hardcover 280 Pages
• ISBN-10: 029764565X
• ISBN-13: 9780297645658
• Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Pub date: Jan 01, 2003
• Also available as: Paperback and eBook

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