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Glow: A novel
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Published:
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2015
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Description

South London, May 2010: foxes are behaving strangely, Burmese immigrants are going missing, and everyone is trying to get hold of a new party drug called Glow. A young man suffering from a rare sleep disorder will uncover the connections between all these anomalies in this taut, riveting new novel by a young writer hailed by The Guardian as “playful, arresting, unnerving, opulent, rude and—above all—deliciously, startlingly, exuberantly fresh.” 

Twenty-two-year-old Raf spends his days walking Rose, a bull terrier who guards the transmitters for a pirate radio station, and his nights at raves in warehouses and launderettes. When his friend Theo vanishes without a trace, Raf’s efforts to find him will lead straight into the heart of a global corporate conspiracy. Meanwhile, he’s falling in love with a beautiful young woman he met at one of those raves, but he’ll soon discover that there is far more to Cherish than meets the eye. 
Combining the pace, drama, and explosive plot twists of a thriller with his trademark intellectual, linguistic, and comedic pyrotechnics, Glow is Ned Beauman’s most compelling, virtuosic, and compulsively readable novel yet.

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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
01/20/2015
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780385352611
ASIN:
B00M60RKQY
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Ned Beauman. (2015). Glow: A novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Ned Beauman. 2015. Glow: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Ned Beauman, Glow: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Ned Beauman. Glow: A Novel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Needs Update?:
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Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:09:11
Date Updated:
Oct 12, 2021 05:33:26
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 24, 2024 09:38:05
Last Metadata Change:
Jun 04, 2023 14:38:03
Last Availability Check:
Mar 24, 2024 09:38:07
Last Availability Change:
Oct 05, 2023 22:01:16
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
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        NED BEAUMAN was born in London in 1985 and studied philosophy at the University of Cambridge. His first novel, Boxer, Beetle, won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award and the Goldberg Prize; his second, The Teleportation Accident, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. In 2013, he was the youngest on Granta’s once-a-decade list of the Best Young British Novelists.

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title
Glow
fullDescription

South London, May 2010: foxes are behaving strangely, Burmese immigrants are going missing, and everyone is trying to get hold of a new party drug called Glow. A young man suffering from a rare sleep disorder will uncover the connections between all these anomalies in this taut, riveting new novel by a young writer hailed by The Guardian as “playful, arresting, unnerving, opulent, rude and—above all—deliciously, startlingly, exuberantly fresh.” 

Twenty-two-year-old Raf spends his days walking Rose, a bull terrier who guards the transmitters for a pirate radio station, and his nights at raves in warehouses and launderettes. When his friend Theo vanishes without a trace, Raf’s efforts to find him will lead straight into the heart of a global corporate conspiracy. Meanwhile, he’s falling in love with a beautiful young woman he met at one of those raves, but he’ll soon discover that there is far more to Cherish than meets the eye. 
Combining the pace, drama, and explosive plot twists of a thriller with his trademark intellectual, linguistic, and comedic pyrotechnics, Glow is Ned Beauman’s most compelling, virtuosic, and compulsively readable novel yet.

reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Shannon Reed, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
      • content: "A novel that wakes us up . . . enchants readers with an intricate plot, dazzles with distinct characters [and] simply thrills with a unique, distinctive writing style. . . . The book starts off fast and sharp and has the feeling of a gas pedal being slowly forced to the floor as it goes on."
      • premium: False
      • source: Wendy Smith, The Washington Post
      • content: "Beauman's zest for everyday comedy and a well-turned sentence is as evident as ever from the first scene. . . Casual surrealism makes an early appearance, too, in the shape of a fox trotting down the spiral staircase of a double-decker bus [and] Raf is his most fully fleshed-out protagonist. . . . Although the product of Beauman's unique sensibility, GLOW also is surprisingly close to a conventional thriller. Its baroque plot is carefully constructed right down to an ambiguous resolution that doles out minimal justice while making it clear that the corrupt world order is unchanged. And the novel has a warmth, particularly in the person of good-hearted, loose-living Raf, that marks a pleasing development in the career of this wildly talented young writer."
      • premium: False
      • source: J.C. Gabel, The Los Angeles Times
      • content: "Reads at a breakneck pace of a who-done-it potboiler--albeit a virtuosic, unconventional one [with] Beauman's satirical eye for dialogue, arcane trivia and caustic witticisms. . . [He] is one of those rare novelists who can dream up intricate, incongruous plot, pepper them with his historical facts, whip in biting British humor, and just like that--they become almost believable."
      • premium: False
      • source: Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly
      • content: "When critics talk about 'boy genius' authors, they're talking about guys like Ned Beauman. . . . His latest introduces a pill-popping raver named Raf who discovers that a friend has been kidnapped by mysterious forces in a white van. It's a pulpy whodunit, but it develops into something much weirder [that] by the end you might feel as if your brain had been CrossFit training."
      • premium: False
      • source: Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
      • content: "Antic [and] madly engaging....The main attraction again is the way Beauman seeds his byzantine plots with odd and amusing asides [that prove] the author--still shy of thirty--has a boundless ability to entertain."
      • premium: False
      • source: Jay McInerney
      • content: "I've never read anything quite like Ned Beauman's Glow, though if I had to, I'd say that he reminds me at moments of William Gibson and others of Irvine Welsh. As far as I can tell, Glow is a sophisticated literary thriller wrapped around a love story. On the evidence of this very entertaining novel, Beauman may or may not be a neuroscientist, but he's definitely a gifted stylist and storyteller."
      • premium: False
      • source: The Guardian
      • content: "We are in the presence of a genuine talent here. . . . Beauman's great originality and skill [and] intelligent aesthetic often provide pure revitalising reading pleasure; he is playful, arresting, unnerving, opulent, rude and--above all, deliciously, startingly, exuberantly fresh."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        September 22, 2014
        This droll, clever, and intelligent novel has an undercurrent of thriller, but it’s a young man’s thriller—or, more accurately, a slacker’s thriller. The setting is 2010 London amid a milieu of underemployed 20-somethings in search of love, raves, and drugs, most notably the “glow” of the title, a new, Ecstasy-like designer drug with an epic reputation. Protagonist Raf’s primary occupation seems to be walking the dog who guards the transmitter of a pirate radio station. He’s also dealing with a “non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome”—he has an abnormal circadian rhythm—that requires a strict, complicated sleep regimen (“It’s like his brain is wearing a novelty watch”). At a rave, he first hears of “glow” and meets the beautiful Cherish. Raf is odd, but the events happening around him are odder still, including the abduction of his friend Theo by a couple of guys driving “a grimy white builder’s van.” The quest for glow, and the story behind the white van, paces the novel, which grows into a complex (but vague) conspiracy story, with lengthy (but interesting) digressions into the backstories of people like Cherish. Beauman writes like a dream (bicycle couriers have a “famished muscularity”), but his plotting is nothing more than a framework supporting a glimpse into a dystopian slacker universe, as well as the neurochemistry of mind-altering substances and the global drug trade.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        November 1, 2014
        A new club drug tangles a scenester in a global conspiracy in this quirky tale of love and corporate overreach.The third novel by Beauman (The Teleportation Accident, 2013, etc.) opens with Raf, a 22-year-old Londoner, at a rave, where he hears about an Ecstasy-like drug called glow. He's intrigued, and not exclusively for pleasure-seeking reasons: Raf suffers from "non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome," a condition that wrecks normal circadian rhythms, and studying glow plays into his interest in the body's peculiar chemistry. But his investigations uncover something more sinister: Paramilitary types in white vans are kidnapping Burmese men, and Raf soon learns of an effort by a multinational mining company, Lacebark, to control production of glow's organic source in Myanmar. Guiding him through this underworld is Cherish, a half-Burmese woman whose father was a Lacebark executive. She's smart and tough-minded, and a romance soon develops, but Raf doesn't know if he can trust the array of ex-Lacebark employees, Burmese expat revolutionaries and rave promoters who make a relatively benign drug seem like a deadly experience in a hurry. (The bulk of the novel takes place across two weeks.) Beauman writes thoughtfully on how drugs play with the senses, and the novel is spiked with clever observations that connect body chemistry with big-data algorithms and corporate exploitation. In other moments, Raf's bantering with Cherish and his stumblebum investigations add a dose of comedy. But the overall plot is exceedingly convoluted, with just about every character's motivations called into question until everybody seems like a double or triple agent. This may play into Beauman's point about the difficulty of nailing down the nature of the human condition, but the closing pages are burdened by who-did-what-to-whom explication. A respectable effort to play with the thriller form that gets bogged down by those very same thriller mechanics.

        COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        July 1, 2014

        In 2010 London's hip rave and drug subculture, Raf, a 22-year-old freelance web designer with an unusual sleep disorder, meets a beautiful and exotic young Burmese American woman named Cherish at a rave in a launderette. Soon Raf is immersed in a shadowy underground of Burmese immigrants battling a sinister corporate conspiracy. The American mining corporation Lacebark has been exploiting Burmese miners for years, but now as mining profits decrease they're looking for a new source of revenue and have decided to enter the illegal drug business. Their product is a mysterious drug used by the Burmese miners called Glow, which only Win, a Burmese chemist in London, knows how to manufacture. Shady characters in white vans are suddenly traversing London, kidnapping Burmese immigrants, and Lacebark has set up a supersecret training facility in a warehouse preparing for a series of raids designed to capture Win and eliminate the opposition. Now, Raf's involvement with Cherish may also make him a target. VERDICT Beauman, named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2013, has crafted a raucous, seriocomic mash-up of mystery and noir. Combining a wickedly inventive plot with dazzling metaphors and trenchant social observations, this smart and streetwise novel will bring a glow to the reader as well.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

        Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity
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South London, May 2010: foxes are behaving strangely, Burmese immigrants are going missing, and everyone is trying to get hold of a new party drug called Glow. A young man suffering from a rare sleep disorder will uncover the connections between all these anomalies in this taut, riveting new novel by a young writer hailed by The Guardian as “playful, arresting, unnerving, opulent, rude and—above all—deliciously, startlingly, exuberantly fresh.” 

Twenty-two-year-old Raf spends his days walking Rose, a bull terrier who guards the transmitters for a pirate radio station, and his nights at raves in warehouses and launderettes. When his friend Theo vanishes without a trace, Raf’s efforts to find him will lead straight into the heart of a global corporate conspiracy. Meanwhile, he’s falling in love with a beautiful young woman he met at one of those raves, but he’ll soon discover that there is far more to Cherish...

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