A disappointing book that was not for me. Robert, a writer with writer's block was a unlikeable, self-centred character. Patrick was a writer who had been hired to ghost write a biography of a Russian oligarch who suddenly died. When the two meet, Robert decides to use Patrick's story in a novel of his own, but he is unsure if Patrick is telling the truth and if he is, will the Russians try to stop him. Unfortunately after a promising start, the book seems to lose it's way. The end just fizzled away. I turned the page expecting more only to discover it had ended.
This is an honest review of a complementary ARC.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 4, 2021

Novelists often base characters on people they know. They sometimes go so far as to tell another person’s story in the form of a novel. Is it a form of theft to use a real person’s life as the basis for a fictional story? Should the author obtain consent before incorporating details of a person’s life into a novel? Chris Power explores the ethics of creating fiction in A Lonely Man.

Robert Prowe is a British novelist. He irritated his mother by basing an early story on a childhood vacation in Greece. Now he is tempted to repeat that potential sin by writing about a mysterious man who may or may not be involved in Russian political intrigue.

Robert is living in Berlin and struggling to find a story worth telling. He’s under a contract deadline to produce a new book. During a chance meeting in a bookstore, Robert learns that Patrick Unsworth is also a British writer, but one whose domain is nonfiction. Patrick ghostwrites biographies for celebrities and politicians.

Patrick seems a bit drunk and disagreeable. He clearly has no friends in Berlin. As an act of charity, Robert agrees to meet Patrick for a drink. When the meeting finally occurs, Patrick explains that he had to cancel or no-show earlier meetings because he was being followed. Robert believes that Patrick is imagining things but listens to Patrick’s story.

Patrick explains that he was hired to ghostwrite a tell-all book for a Russian oligarch who had the goods on Putin. After the project was underway, the oligarch was found dead, having apparently hanged himself. Patrick is certain that the oligarch was murdered and that Russians in the service of Putin are coming for him too.

Robert doesn’t believe Patrick is in danger. He nevertheless believes that Patrick’s story would be a good plot for a novel. As Robert begins to work on the novel, he even includes himself as a character, the writer who listens to Patrick’s story. The story of the oligarch’s suicide resonates with Robert when he learns that an old friend has hung himself in a closet, a strange place to take one’s life.

A Lonely Man follows the two men as they walk the thin line between paranoia and danger. As events unfold, the reader wonders whether Patrick is delusional or the actual target of Putin’s thugs. Robert asks those same questions. Someone indeed seems to be following them when Patrick is with Robert. Someone then seems to be following Robert, who may have placed himself in danger by listening to Patrick’s storis about Putin and the oligarch. Robert even receives a phone call that might be perceived as a threat to harm his wife.

Whether Robert or his family are actually in danger is ambiguous for much of the novel. That ambiguity contributes to the novel’s evolving tension, as the reader wonders whether branding Patrick’s fears as paranoia will be a fatal mistake.

Robert arguably invites trouble by befriending Patrick. He does so in part because he feels an affinity with Patrick, but Robert also believes Patrick’s story might be what he needs to overcome writer’s block. Karijn, Robert’s wife, does not approve of Robert’s appropriation of Patrick’s story without Patrick’s consent. Robert argues that writers steal life stories all the time. He is troubled, however, by his developing sense that “another person had grown up inside him, a shadow-self whose existence she knew nothing about.” Robert is becoming like Patrick, but is he becoming paranoid or is really facing a threat?

Chris Power sets the tone by building distractions into the story that seem vaguely menacing. Robert and Karijn own a cabin on wooded property near a lake in Sweden. When Robert visits the property with a plumber to repair a pump, the trip seems ominous for no obvious reason. When he later takes his daughters to inspect a fort they built in the woods a year earlier, the presence of beer cans suggests intrusion into the family’s privacy. Yet until the final pages, it isn’t clear whether Robert or his family are at any risk of harm at all.

The last few pages provide an anticlimactic answer to that question. They force Robert to make a choice between loyalty or betrayal, the kind of moral choice that makes spy fiction so fascinating. Yet the ending seems abrupt. It is foreshadowed by all that comes before, but it leaves the reader hanging. Novels often challenge a reader to imagine what will come next. This one leaves the feeling that the story is unfinished, that the reader will need to do all the important work.

Still, Power proves his ability to set a scene and to create characters in depth. At first blush, the title seems to refer to Patrick, who has no friend but Robert. Upon reflection, the reader might wonder whether Robert is the lonely one. Perhaps Robert reached out to Patrick not just for story material but to make a connection to someone from his homeland, a connection he can’t easily find in Berlin, one that his Swedish wife cannot provide. That might be why Patrick travels back to London for the suicide victim’s wake, despite not having kept in touch with the man during their years apart. A Lonely Man demonstrates Chris Power’s writing skill and offers the reader an intriguing story on multiple levels, even if the ending is a bit disappointing.

RECOMMENDED

An intriguing story of how two Englishmen get caught in the net of a Russian oligarch in Berlin.

Robert, a reasonably successful writer, and father of two daughters, happens to meet Patrick a ghost-writer of a Russian oligarch. The latter tells him an incredible story about the life and mysterious death of a Russian oligarch. The whole story is overlaid by excessive alcohol consumption by the two subjects. What is truth, and what is imagination in semi-madness?

Robert takes advantage of the situation and sees the chance of a lifetime to use Patrick's story to re-establish himself as a successful writer. The friendship between the two breaks up. The Russian counterpart is not at all interested in publishing the story and takes massive action.

Chris Power manages to bring great tension into the story. The setting in Berlin is reminiscent of the dark times of the Cold War. The suspense lasts until the showdown on a cold and dark winter night in Sweden. What is truth, and what is fiction? Let's find out; it's worth it.

Books about writers doing the act of writing are a dime-a-dozen it seems. I can recall reading Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, which was like reading a long dissertation on how to have a career as a prolific writer. Even David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, a more recent read, is a book about writing songs and how art comes to fruition through the inspiration and writing process. (So even though it is not necessarily a book about literature or writing as a literary act, it kind of is a book about writing in some ways — if you can think of songcraft as a writing exercise.) You can probably come up with more examples, but here’s a new one: Chris Power’s debut novel A Lonely Man. It is a book about writer’s block, a book about stealing other people’s stories, and a book about travelling across Europe to gain some Old-World literary inspiration. It is also a thriller, though that aspect of the book is a bit more muted.

Set in Berlin (for the most part), the book opens with a writer named Robert Prowe (whose surname is an anagram of Power’s) reaching for the same book in a bookstore at the same time as a man named Patrick. Later on, that same evening, Robert and his wife save Patrick from a vicious beating on the street after he leaves the store. When Patrick then offers to buy Robert a drink on another day as a favour, Robert can’t say no. It turns out that Patrick is also a writer, too — he’s a ghostwriter, and his latest client was a deceased Russian oligarch whose death may or may not have been a suicide. It turns out that Patrick is being followed by people who may or may not want him dead, too — and, pretty soon, as Robert and Patrick become “friends” so that Robert can steal Patrick’s recent life story for a novel he wants to write, Robert begins to notice strange things happening to befall him as well.

A Lonely Man is not a bad thriller. It is well written. However, the thrills don’t really add up to much on the page and you can kind of see the ending coming from a mile away. (It also helps if you know something of recent Russian history and politics, and that’s a topic of interest for you.) In any event, the main problem the novel has is that its inciting action is fed by a main character who continuously makes bad choices. If Robert had saved Patrick but had declined his offer of meeting up later, then A Lonely Man would have been a very short book, indeed. Also, if Robert decided to not write down Patrick’s story for his own novel, well, (and here’s a spoiler alert) he wouldn’t have gotten himself into any sort of hot water with the people who may or may not be following Patrick. Thus, it’s hard to take any sort of pity on the plight of Robert Prowe. He doesn’t seem too hardwired to realize that he’s walking into danger, so it is hard to take pity on him.

The book does, however, succeed in making you feel a little bit — not a lot, but a little bit — paranoid from the get-go, that the people who may be following Patrick are in the shadows for Robert. The thing is, there’s not enough of that in the book. You have Robert going off early in the book to check in on a property he owns with his family in Sweden, and while being alone in the cottage offers some chance at some genuine creepy “is he being followed?”-style chills, the opportunity is squandered by Power, the writer. Instead, the author of this tome is more interested in how writers come up with their stories, and whether their sources are stolen from when they’re not aware that every nuance and detail is being recorded by a hidden recording device. It’s interesting for a plotline, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. In the end, what you get in A Lonely Man is a bit of a hackneyed story.

Still, for all of its faults, the novel is fairly short and can be read in a sitting or two. It does have atmosphere, even if it is of the mild variety. And there’s the kernel of a great idea in how Robert exploits his new friendship to get something he can sell for profit. Still, it’s the niggling things that keep nagging at you. For instance, and here might come another spoiler, if Patrick is somewhat aware that he is being used by Robert, why does he continuously keep meeting up with him in Berlin’s nightlife scene? It might have made for a much stronger novel if Patrick became something of a protagonist in his own right and started using Robert for his own means — that is, to remove the spotlight of those who may be following him off him and transition onto them onto the trail of Robert, instead, much more explicitly. (And then disappear?) And even though the ending is a bit chilling, it isn’t wholly satisfying because it doesn’t have any earlier payoffs. The novel meanders through a friend of Robert’s suicide, which takes up a significant third of the book without relating back to the Robert-Patrick axis. And, of course, Robert goes off to other countries, while Patrick languishes hiding out in Berlin, putting this friendship on hold for a great deal of the book.

Thus, A Lonely Man is just an okay book. It’s readable and has interesting ideas — it’s just that they don’t feel fully realized in any way. This is a shame because Chris Power has a gem of an idea for a book here — it just needs a little more cat in the cat and mouse game. (To wit, the end of the book has a scene with dead mice in it, which is a little bit of a nod to what Power is trying to do with this novel.) There’s a lot to think about when it comes to this book, but the thing is you probably won’t think about the book too much when you close the cover for the final time. Still, A Lonely Man offers an interesting and intriguing premise, and offer’s up one heck of a what if? That is to say, what if there was more paranoia in A Lonely Man, and what if it actually had something concrete to say about the writing life? I guess for the rest of us, we’ll have our Stephen Kings and David Mitchells. That’ll do. That’ll do.

Happy Pub Date (May 4, 2021) to Chris Power's A Lonely Man, and thanks to FSG for an advance Netgalley and finished print copy of this title. I'm writing this review voluntarily.

Robert is a British writer currently in a slump: he's released one short story collection, but his novel is now way overdue. At a reading in Berlin, he runs into Patrick--a mess of a guy who gets into a drunken public brawl. Of course, Patrick is also an author.

Patrick is a ghostwriter; he's recently been working on a Russian oligarch's autobiography, but the man ended up committing suicide. Or, did he? According to Patrick, the man was murdered, and Patrick thinks he's next on the chopping block. Robert believes this story is too ridiculous to be true, but it's the perfect plot to steal for his book. As Robert befriends Patrick and writes and records more and more of his outlandish tale, strange occurrences start to mount up. Is Patrick actually telling the truth? And, if so, are Robert and his wife and kids now in danger?

A Lonely Man has a genius premise that shows how metafiction can be thrilling and exciting, as opposed to stuffy and boring, and the book expertly wrangles with essential questions about the ethics of artistic license when it comes to telling someone else's story. The novel's also a great quick read that's easy to get sucked into in one sitting. The book does have some pacing problems, though, relating back to the practical mechanics of the plot (ie how do you make a story about two guys sitting and talking consistently interesting and dynamic?). Robert's insistent belief that Patrick is a liar also loses its impact with time, so the reader will probably be less surprised at the novel's ultimate ending than Robert is. Overall, this is a really fun, smart book. And to all the struggling writers out there praying for a perfect story subject to fall into their laps: you might want to be careful what you wish for.

In a Berlin bookstore, two Englishmen meet while reaching for the same volume of Bolaño. Robert Prowe is an author with an acute case of writer’s block, constantly putting off his agent and publishers while balancing his life as a loving husband to Karijn and slightly grumpy father to their two little girls, Nora and Sonja. He’s a respectable family man, if self-conscious of being the stereotypical author unable to produce his sophomore work, a novel meant to follow up on his successful debut collection of stories.

Patrick Unsworth is drunk and down on his luck, and a mixture of circumstance and compassion finds Robert sympathetically listening to Patrick’s woes. A successful ghost writer himself, Patrick had been hired by Sergei Vanyashin, an exiled Russian oligarch and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, to help author Vanyashin’s memoirs. But when Vanyashin dies of an apparent suicide, Patrick takes fright and flees England for the continent, afraid that whomever killed his boss might also have him on their hit list. For Vanyashin had confided quite a bit of incriminating evidence to his amanuensis, evidence that might make him a valuable target for Russian hitmen himself.

Robert isn’t sure whether to take Patrick seriously, but he’s certainly drawn to the tale Patrick is telling, so much so that he decides to use it as the basis for a story, perhaps even his next novel. Karijn gets wind of this and urges her husband to come clean with Patrick about using the other man’s life as inspiration. Robert agrees that it’s the ethical thing to do, but for whatever reason doesn’t get around to it, even after meeting with Patrick several more times and unspooling more of Patrick’s story. Robert thus has to think fast when Karijn makes an innocent proposal:

QUOTE
‘Maybe invite him for dinner.’

‘No,’ he said automatically. He hadn’t expected her to suggest it.

She laughed. ‘Is it such a terrifying thought?’

‘No, it’s--’ Robert tried to think of the most off-putting response. ‘I guess it’s just that I don’t know how much of what he’s telling me is genuine. It’s a good story, but you remember what he was like the night we met him. I’m worried he might be a bit, I don’t know, unpredictable.’

Karijn pulled away and looked at him. ‘You don’t think he’s actually dangerous, do you?’

Robert drew in a deep breath, as if evaluating. ‘I’d say probably not,’ he said slowly. ‘But I’d want to be certain before I invited him into our home.’
END QUOTE

The question of whether Patrick is telling the truth and surrounded by danger, or whether he’s delusional and perhaps the more dangerous for it, makes up a large part of this elegant literary thriller. Robert encourages Patrick to keep sharing his story despite growing increasingly uncomfortable with what he sees as the other man’s paranoia. Surely there can’t actually be government-sponsored hitmen out to get a mere writer. Surely these people Patrick claims are following him are merely innocent passersby.

But even as Robert dissociates Patrick’s desperation from reality, he’s writing his own version of Patrick’s life, padding things a little here, adding his own motivations there. When Patrick inevitably discovers what Robert has been doing, he’s understandably upset, for more reasons than one. Robert, however, has his justifications:

QUOTE
‘I don’t see what you’re getting so angry about,’ Robert said. ‘You told your story to a novelist. This is what novelists do. They take things that happen to people and they… tweak them.’

‘Steal them. Cheapen them.’

Robert dropped his head back and sighed as he looked up at the ceiling. ‘Yes, fine, cheapen them.’

‘I thought I was talking to a friend, not a novelist.’
END QUOTE

As the two men grapple with the boundaries of their relationship and with the ethics of writing, Robert must also come to terms with his own ideas of morality and mortality. Worryingly, his own life is beginning to display parallels with Patrick’s. Is Patrick’s paranoia contagious, or are people really out to get them both?

I greatly enjoyed the story within a story presented here, especially since Chris Power loosely draws from his own life to fill out the details, creating a third metaphysical layer for readers to unfold. Rarely have the ethics and craft of fictionalization made for such compelling, thrilling reading. Too often the juxtaposition of genres -- particularly one so vital as crime with the more inward-facing studies of the literary -- makes for a dull or confusing read as authors choose the form of intellectualism over the function of entertainment. Mr Power, however, deftly balances his influences to present a suspenseful yet still thoughtful novel of trust and belief and what we, writers or otherwise, owe to the people we spin our stories around.

What happens when a writer appropriates someone else's story? That's the question Power poses in this take of Robert, ,who meets Patrick when he saves him from a thug in a bar fight Turns out Patrick is a ghostwriter who claims to have secret information about Putin a a result of his work with Sergei Vayashin, an oligarch who ran afoul of Putin and now is dead. Robert, who has had writers block, decides to weave what Patrick told him into a novel- and then creepy and menacing things start to happen. This wanders a bit at times but it's intriguing. Great settings (Berlin- Russians!). Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary thrillers.

Evocative of a Patricia Highsmith novel, A Lonely Man by Chris Powers is a tightly plotted thriller set in Europe. The novel follows Robert, a Londoner living in Berlin with his Swedish wife and children, and Patrick, a fellow expat Brit, who comes to share with Robert his dangerous past, potentially putting them both in harms way. Like a Ripley novel, Power’s protagonist spends his time in European locales and is ensnared in a plot of political intrigue and murder. Despite these expansive settings, A Lonely Man is smaller than any of Highsmith’s works. This ultimately works in the book’s favor as a slow burn comes to a quick, somewhat tidier, end in it’s last 50 pages or so. Readers looking for a fun summer thriller with a global perspective will appreciate A Lonely Man, and will be pleased to find that it has more to say than a by the numbers entry to the genre.

Robert is (cue hoary cliché) a stalled novelist with writer's block, a thirty-something Brit living in expat comfort with his Swedish wife and two cute daughters, in Berlin's bourgeois Prenzlauer Berg. He meets Patrick, a British ghostwriter who claims to be on the run from a shadowy Russian state intelligence network after an abortive project writing the memoirs of a second-tier Russian oligarch.

Totally entertaining and page-turning, even though I can't decide whether this is a thriller with literary pretensions or a literary novel appropriating elements of the thriller genre. Some slow-building tension and menace, and occasional shocking bits of violence, all of which would have been totally unremarkable in any second-tier Scandi Noir show from the early 2010s.

But the more literary elements were more effective here: evocative and atmospheric descriptions of Berlin's bleak wintry cityscape, depressing rainy old London, an austere Swedish lakeside cabin, and the trappings of billionaire Russian wealth offshore in mansions and stately homes. And especially the seamless transitions between the framing narrative, told by the first-person narrator, and the novel-within-the-novel, which he adapts from the (ostensibly) true story he's surreptitiously taping into what reads like a (deliberately) overwritten potboiler.

Thanks to FSG and Netgalley for a free ARC, in exchange for an honest review.

I tried to read this, but gave up about 1/4 of the way through. It was definitely a DNF for me. I would still read more by the author. However, I just didn't connect with this story.

2/5 Stars

While grippingly narrated, this remains an underwhelming tale featuring stock characters revolving round an unappealing central figure. An excess of description and a predictable resolution add to its burdens.

What a thrilling, mystery of a novel. In "A Lonely Man," a writer Robert meets a man named Patrick at a reading. Patrick is a ghostwriter who, until recently, was at work on the memoirs of a Russian oligarch. At least, that is what he tells Robert. Whether he is telling the truth or not is one of the larger mysteries of the novel. Regardless, Robert finds Patrick's personal tale ripe for a telling of his own, and begins writing a novel loosely based off Patrick's adventures in writing the oligarch's memoirs. So, this is also a novel about writers, and the creative process, and whose story belongs to whom. Of course, not everything is exactly what it seems.

I loved Power's prose, and there is a kind of easy intimacy he renders between Robert as a husband, and Robert as a father (some of the passages between Robert and his two children are some of the sweetest I have ever read). Of course, the unraveling and paranoia that we become submerged in is also one of the best and most surprising aspects to "A Lonely Man." This is a small miracle of a novel.

Quite a ride. The deliberate pacing at the beginning is deceptively lulling, after which the rollercoaster begins until the shattering climax. Robert's initial skepticism lends itself to the reader, and there is so much in the real world that the possibility of danger from a scary source is entirely plausible. Looking forward to more from this debut author.

Every so often a book comes along whose narrative style just fits so well within your brain grooves that things that normally draw you in don’t seem to matter much anymore. This was very much the case with this book for me. This book, that had spy themes I usually don’t go for and a fairly dislikeable protagonist, managed to really engage me on a pretty profound level.
Maybe it’s something to do with isolation, since this is the perfect time for such a thing. Or loneliness, which is universal and separate from politics. This book features not one, but several lonely man, though lonely on different levels. Each one meeting the other seemingly at random and each one’s life is forever changes because of it.
It starts off with two men casually reaching for the same book at a bookstore, which is pretty much a near perfect way to meet someone. One of them is drunk, one of them is there for a book reading, their interaction is brief, meaningless and would have been instantly forgotten, had it not continued almost immediately afterwards with one of them being attacked and the other coming to his rescue. Thus a connection is established.
Both men are British, both are strangers in Berlin, though to different degrees. One of them is an author desperately trying and failing to write a follow up to his published and fairly well received short story collection. The other has a story to tell, a wild story about being contacted as a ghost writer for an exiled oligarch.
Soon the lines between fiction and reality begin to be erased, a pervasive paranoia seeped through from one man to the other, mingled with distrust and a mutual need for company, albeit for different reasons. It turns into an exploitative relationship, but also strangely symbiotic. There’s no question that the protagonist is the one doing the exploiting, appropriating someone’s story for his own gain, and yet, immoral as that may be, it makes for a strangely compelling journey into darkness.
There’s a fascinatingly serpentine quality to it all or maybe, more appropriately, a nesting doll motif. Chris Power himself is a British author for whom this book is a sophomore effort after a well received short story collection. It’s a story within a story within a story. It’s clever and oddly magnetic of a construct.
And the writing…well, it’s great. The internationally set story displays a terrific ability to convey the place every time, be it the rainy London, bleak graffitied Berlin or tranquil isolation of Sweden. Every location provides a perfect stage for the characters’ development, contributing to or echoing their state of mind, every one is their own way a place of loneliness, not aloneness but a certain disconnect with the world around. It works excellently.
There’s plenty of suspense too, but this isn’t exactly a thriller in a traditional way, more of a darkly psychological game for two with danger potentially lurking around the corner.
I enjoyed this book very much, it read quickly so I didn’t have to put it down too much, two sittings really and well worth the time. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

A classic "writer novelizing a dangerous true tale" story, "A Lonely Man" follows Robert, a young writer in Berlin. Gestating not too much in the way of words, while with a wonderful wife and two daughters, he stumbles onto Patrick, a driven, perhaps shifty ghost writer who fears Putin's reach because of starting a book by one of those Russian oligarchs who could only have been born from as cataclysmic an event as the end of the Cold War. Is Patrick for real or just paranoid? Why does Robert latch onto Patrick's images and scenes so frantically? It can't turn out well. A Lonely Man begins as a cross between a modest expatriate tale and a thriller by Robert Harris (remember his The Ghost?) but darkens and deepens, the prose precise and immersive, into an existential drama that enthralls. Domesticity nestles with opulence, violence with tawdriness. Lit thriller par excellence.

I've never had a problem with books-about-writers, books-about-writing, books-about-writers-traveling-through-Europe-reflecting-on-their-craft. There are a lot of them that I can think of that I really loved. But for me the start of this was really slow. I don't want to say it was boring but it also wasn't not boring. By the time it picks up though, it is so tense and so anxiety-inducing. So what started out not my favorite ended up being a *wildly* stressful book that I enjoyed a lot and that I think is going to linger in my brain.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Robert has written a book of short stories that got him recognition and a contract to write a novel. Now Robert has moved from London to Berlin with his wife and two young daughters and his novel is eighteen months past due. By chance Robert meets another writer from London named Patrick. Patrick ghostwrites books for public figures. He was working on a book for a Russian oligarch, but he died before the book was completed. Patrick now thinks that the people who killed the oligarch are going to kill him next. Robert is not sure how much of this is real and how much of this is paranoid fantasies, but he thinks maybe he can keep Patrick talking long enough to take this story and turn it into a novel. This is such a fun, twisting novel.

A story of writers and the path to the art of writing. How one can become obsessed with the characters and sometimes haunted by them which something can be a dangerous life to lead.

A writer struggling with his second book happens across a ghostwriter of celebrity autobiographies - with quite the story to tell. Hired to write the autobio of an exiled Russian oligarch - one of Putin’s many enemies - the oligarch has been found dead of an apparent suicide. But the ghostwriter is convinced that Putin is behind the death and that his assassins are hunting down all associates of the oligarch - and he’s next.

Chris Power’s debut novel A Lonely Man starts promisingly and has an intriguing premise but he doesn’t do enough to develop it into something more engaging. As a result my interest began to dip after the first act and kept going down until I was relieved to finish the book.

Power sets up the premise well and I enjoyed the initial meetings between Robert and Patrick. Robert’s a frustrated novelist, Patrick’s a man on the run - all well and good. But beyond learning about Patrick’s involvement with Russian politics, nothing further happens. What was the point of seeing Patrick get the job of ghostwriter when he already told us that’s what he was hired to do? It added nothing. Robert goes to a friend’s funeral, he goes to his Swedish holiday home to write, he contemplates an affair for no reason, there’s some suggestion of harassment from Russian goons - it’s precious little substance to make up nearly all of a novel.

I think Power was trying to create some ambiguity about whether or not Patrick was telling the truth or was making it up but I was never convinced he was a fantasist, which only made the ending all the more anticlimactic and flat. Also, Power attempted some feeble pontificating about the ethics of a writer writing about other people’s lives for their own gain which was neither clever or thoughtful.

The passages about the writing process itself were sorta interesting, the book is easy to read and is mostly well-written, and I liked the early scenes of the novel. But for a literary thriller it’s not very tense at all and painfully insubstantial. Also, Power has nothing new to say about the Putin regime that most people won’t already know/suspect (let alone those like me who’ve read entire books on the subject like Ben Mezrich’s Once Upon a Time in Russia) so it’s an extra-forgettable narrative!

It starts well but Chris Power unfortunately failed to realise any of the premise’s potential. A Lonely Man is an increasingly tedious and underwhelming literary thriller that leaves no impression behind whatsoever.

Chris Power's A Lonely Man is a creative take on a thriller. With echos of Henry James and Patricia Highsmith, and even a little American Psycho in there, this novel blurs the line between a con and reality.