The Pieces, Paperback

In 1968, English folk-singer Adam Earnshaw vanishes during a tour of the U.S. What happened to him?In The Pieces, a dazzling array of voices – university friends, lovers, fellow-musicians, a pirate radio DJ, an American record producer, an obsessive, self-destructive teenage girl – contribute their own fragments to the puzzle. In the end, there is an answer. But when it comes, it forces us to rethink everything we have just read.

James Wilson is known for his ability to inhabit different times and lives. In this, his seventh work of fiction, he brings his unique gift to bear – with the ambition and breadth of a Victorian novelist – on the late 1960s, with all their anxiety, hope, recklessness, excess, energy, and idealism. The result is a vivid, hugely entertaining, portrait of England at a pivotal moment in its recent history, when British and American artists and musicians were together forging a revolutionary popular culture that continues to shape our world today.

Superbly written and plotted, by turns funny and moving, and teeming with unforgettable characters, The Pieces carries readers back to that era – and shows them why it was so momentous – like no other novel before.