Unfinished Business
On sale
19th January 2023
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Reviews
The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn't published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback . . . The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel's climax stuns like a concussion - worse than that, because it's not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming
Michael Bracewell is an extraordinary stylist who's able to summon whole eras with a few deft phrases. In Unfinished Business, his prose mastery of cultural codes and aesthetic textures is put to work on the most intimate kinds of hope and loss. As a novelist he dazzles, then breaks your heart, and I wish I knew how he pulls it off
Unfinished Business is humane, intimate and affecting because it explores universal themes - ageing, marriage, friendship, mortality - and celebrates beauty
This sense of innocence and wanting is what gives this eerie novel its power to move and frighten . . . Bracewell excels at this kind of shocked satire, of London's continuing grand delusions
There is an elegance and mystery to Bracewell's writing as well as a sumptuous, slightly chilly delight in the sensuality and texture of things; clothes, food, drink, interiors. His prose evokes a world that is at once unknowable, beautiful and sad
I was won over by this quietly reflective gem of a novel about regret, ageing, and the memory of lost love
I gave up on Proust to read this - there are similarities - and didn't regret it. Not for a moment
This book has the instantly recognisable feel of a minor classic. Melancholic, reflective, it quietly and elegantly asks the big questions: what is a life for, exactly? What does it all amount to? A devastating portrait of a once dazzling life fading to grey
What a poignant, quietly devastating novel, a meditation of loss in all its flavours and pains of late middle age with a Prufrock for our times at its heart
Michael Bracewell's masterpiece was worth the wait. Awash with luxury and regret, suffused with the pent-up emotion of The Great Gatsby and the style of a post-modern dandy, Bracewell delivers something magical
For me, Michael Bracewell, in edgy, elusive works, like Present Tense, Souvenir, and now Unfinished Business, has always been engaged in something very special. A spiritual adventure which embraces all things with huge curiosity, seems present throughout his work
This elegaic, understated story of a man cut adrift in London, haunted by the reality of his own decaying body, is an essay in fracturing memory, a compassionate and tender tale of searching for a better life as time runs short