Praise for Divided Kingdom

'Relentlessly compelling and enormously impressive ... Thomson's conceit is simple, but undeniably cunning ... He is a generous and canny enough writer to make sure that we have enough readerly treats to keep us turning the pages... 

There is also much ...  beautiful descriptive writing ... But if one complains about excess, it is only because the sheer silkiness of Thomson's prose can sometimes undermine the power of its rough edges. And yet he is superlative at catching at vanished atmospheres ... What could feel hackneyed and commonplace is rendered strange, evocative and sensuous.

With all Thomson's delicate and subtle understanding of our emotional lives — and what happens when they are ruptured or blocked — it is tempting to think he didn't need to build such an elaborate satiric superstructure, nor garland it so intricately. This is precisely what his divided kingdom is telling us about, though: our selves are neither public nor private but always, provisionally and riskily, both at the same time'
Alex Clark, Daily Telegraph [their 'Book of the Week']

'An uneasy political allegory in which the old United Kingdom, characterised by "boorishness, thuggery and greed", has been dismembered ... The faux benevolent overtones of the Rearrangement hold a slightly icy echo of Tony Blair's cheerily inclusive "big conversation" and anybody suspected of "undermining the fabric of society" could be held without trial for up to two years, which has current, chilling resonance.

Other than its publication coinciding with an imminent general election, though, Divided Kingdom does not seem to be an explicit poke at the present government so much as a dark fable lampooning the bleakly diminished future for intolerant, segregated societies. Not all is gloom: once we're out of sanguine territory, the picaresque plot crackles along with unexpected energy and some nicely subversive ideas — such as the Blue Quarter's bar where cafe tables have been set out in a drained swimming pool, offering radical patrons a defiant enjoyment of the absence of their defining humour.

Thomson strains our credulity with a few casually demanded leaps of faith, such as the seemingly complete suppression of all personal memory prior to the Rearrangement. Mostly he gets away with it. He has attacked before with bold plotting: his debut, Dreams of Leaving, lifted elements of the Moses story for political satire, whilst The Insult, my favourite, established the strange menace that crouches in the corner of Thomson's vision. Divided Kingdom claims no profound insight but it is unsettling in its familiar cadences, and vigorous in Parry's headlong pursuit of his irrecoverable past.'
James Urquhart, Financial Times

'The moment you open the door into any of Rupert Thomson's eerie and hypnotic fictions, the everyday world slides into an uncanny new dimension. Behind this door, ordinary-seeming people may pursue ordinary-seeming lives, but in an unsettling climate of mystery, peril and enchantment that leaves the reader bewitched and adrift...

Since his debut in 1987, this elegant, silver-cropped former advertising copywriter has crafted a body of work so singular, flavoursome and captivating that you wonder why his fame has not yet matched his talent. His books remain a kind of open secret, an unlocked garden. Each is a hyper-real hallucination lit by sumptuous prose and fuelled by a prodigal gift for atmosphere and suspense ... With Divided Kingdom, his seventh novel, Thomson extends the reach of his matchlessly strange imagination to create a tightly-knit, deftly-designed political fable ... the four personality-based statelets inspire a richly ingenious satire on the arbitrary classifications that often fix our identity '
Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'Thomson is probably the best writer of my generation, whose reputation as a cult author has been slowly growing and whose work is consistently fascinating even when its thrillerish plots can’t quite be sustained by his extraordinarily beautiful minimalist style. Each of his six previous books is as different and original as this one, but what they share is a preoccupation with the tricks played on the mind, and with loners seeking stability through love and crime. Divided Kingdom is in one sense less nightmarish than Soft (in which characters has their minds controlled through viral advertising), and more overtly political than either Air and Fire or The Book of Revelation. In a sense, it is 1984 revisited, through the eyes of Winston’s son — brainwashed yet innocent, until life teaches him to question and challenge what he was taught in the orphanage. The political satire is horribly convincing, especially in the early sections of the novel when describing the increasingly polarised and tribalised world we live in....

Divided Kingdom is also a novel about examining the nature of individual feeling ... a novel both wonderful and full of wonders, whose haunting perception of events both real and imagined compose a uniquely disturbing tale for our time'
Literary Review

'Thomson's imagination goes into overdrive...You will not encounter another book like Divided Kingdom in your lifetime'  Matt Thorne, Waterstone's Books Quarterly

'Rupert Thomson's menacing dystopian visions are always just one remove from present reality ... Thomson's skilful manipulation of the realities of British tribalisms and prejudices into an altogether more horrific scenario is well-judged.  His shimmeringly beautiful use of language is also as striking as ever'  Metro

'Sharply written ... its landscape of fleeting female figures and semi-erotic quests made this reader wonder whether Jungian animas might not lurk at the bottom of its thrillerish descent ...

All this might make Thomson's novel sound unnecessarily forbidding. It is not. One of his great strengths, in a genre that usually takes physical description as read, is an ability to evoke a landscape. There is a terrific scene early on, for example, in which Thomas and a friend cycle wonderingly along an abandoned motorway ("to sanguine people, motorways signified aggression, rage, fatigue, monotony and death"). Out on the empty tarmac, all Thomson's writerly traits instantly declare themselves: the rheumy eye, the absorption in risk and disturbance, the flicker of fear shining up through the life lived perilously out of kilter'
D.J. Taylor, Guardian

'Thomson creates a portrait of Britain that is seductively detailed, disorientating, sometimes funny and often horrifying. His descriptions of each quarter and the wastelands in between are vividly hallucinatory ("the landscape was strewn with the tangled paste jewellery of chemical plants …"), and he is a master at creating an atmosphere of alienation and suspicion'
Sunday Telegraph

'Divided Kingdom shows Rupert Thomson at his very best. Even without the radical reimagining of the English landscape that this novel offers, his writing glimmers with fresh-minted similes and metaphors which make you see the world afresh ... On one level Divided Kingdom is a fabulous romp, an epic adventure story of flight and threat, fear and wonder, shipwrecks, espionage and breathless chase-scenes. On another it's a meditation on what it means to cross borders, to be alien, to seek asylum. It's a sly recasting of the nature versus nurture debate and a compelling account of personal development, of an individual's search for his own true temperament and identity'
Independent

' The atmosphere is faultless. Thomson is brilliant at making the bland sinister, and at turning up the creepy underside of authoritarian cant '  Sunday Times