The Spoiler Hardback - 2012

Media reviews

“McAfee skewers the Fourth Estate with an insider’s insight, cutting wit and razor-sharp writing.”
—Alison McCulloch, The New York Times Book Review

“Sparkles with tabloid bravura . . . a dark hyper-comedy.”
—Examiner.com

“Spirited . . . [McAfee] writes with poise and polish, using her reportorial eye to create a fictional world that feels like a fun-house mirror of journalism from the late ‘90s . . . [that] could not be more timely. . . . McAfee manages to fuse satire and observation together in a potent brew. In doing so, she creates a blackly comic, Waugh-esque portrait of a newspaper . . . peopled with hacks, has-beens, poseurs and some genuine reporters, rabidly ambitious youngsters and weary old-timers, pretentious literary types and gutter-minded twits.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
 
“McAfee . . . highlights the slide of media reporting from serious to scandalous as she crafts a story that catches journalism on the cusp of the electronic age.”
—Library Journal

“McAfee’s assured grasp of the journalistic milieu . . . skillfully pillories the journalists’ anxieties about the coming ‘digital dystopia.’”
—The New Yorker
 
“Enjoyable to read . . . a larkish spirit of farce [and] wicked fun . . . dances the story along.”
—Shelf Awareness
 
“An acid satire of London newspaperdom . . . spiky, vivid, and almost pathologically clever.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A sharp, intelligent novel about ‘old’ journalism, ‘new’ journalism and the moral gap between the two . . . McAfee writes with sparkling intelligence and raises serious issues about the relationship between reporting and truth.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“A dark, sparkly gem of a book: smart, knowing, funny, tragic: Miss Havisham meets Sex and the City.  I don’t know how Annalena McAfee pulled off such a balancing act, but I very much hope she goes on writing novels of this quality. A stunner.”
—Christopher Buckley

“A witty and entertaining debut about two very different worlds of journalism.”
 —Alex Clark, The Guardian