Imperial Bedrooms

In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed with Less Than Zero, his 'extraordinarily accomplished first novel' (New Yorker). Twenty-five years later, he returns to those same characters - to Clay and the band of infamous teenagers whose lives weave sporadically through his - but now they face an even greater period of disaffection: their own middle age. Clay seems to have moved on - he's become a successful screenwriter - but when he returns from New York to Los Angeles, to help cast his new movie, he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle. Only this time, it's darker and more ominous than ever before. Clay's seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal and exploitation finds him connected with Kelly Montrose, a producer whose gruesomely violent death is suddenly very much the talk of the town. And worse still, someone seems to be following him, stalking him even. 'A murder mystery - a woozy, paranoid, hallucinatory version of LA noir' Sunday Times 'Easton Ellis adds the playful self-advertisements of Philip Roth to the ambiguously complicit social reportage of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Imperial Bedrooms ranks with his best exercises in the latter register, teeming with sharp details of a narcissistic generation' Guardian 'Brilliantly written and coolly self-aware . . . has a thriller's pace and structure . . . Here, as in Less Than Zero, Ellis is plumbing the depths of human nature, exposing it at its worst.' Observer 'The novel is a kind of modern noir and, as in Chandler, the form's accepted master, atmosphere is king. Paranoia prevails' Independent on Sunday