The Raw Shark Texts [Import] [Hardcover]

Steven Hall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2007

Published by Canongate in the UK, 2007. Issued without dustjacket in illustrated white boards. SIGNED copy with yellow post-it note with quotation from Mark Haddon. The True First Edition of the book that has become a sensation. Deserving to be shelved somewhere between 'Trainspotting' and 'Life of Pi'.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Canongate; First Edition, First Printing edition (2007)
• ISBN-10: 1847670008
• ISBN-13: 978-1847670007
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (121 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,827,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Odd, different, and enjoyable, March 17, 2007

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel (Hardcover)

Lots of it's good, so let's start with that part. It gets off to an ordinary start - the protagonist has amnesia, so it could be about anything or nothing. It happened just after the death of a wonderful young woman who had taken him into his life. Then peculiarities emerge. This isn't usual amnesia, it recurs. He has these attacks.

He is attacked, it turns out. Something, equal parts philosophical abstraction and carnivore, has chosen Eric Sanderson as prey. With this revelation, we're down the rabbit hole and into a rubbery fantasy world. It's a world like none you've ever seen before, where information turns solid and solid objects are subject to debate. Characters develop reasonably well, with the exception of Mycroft Ward. The writing gets a bit overheated at times and the concept has soft spots, but both progress toward a satisfying end, one that has elements of "Griffin & Sabine" and Gaiman's "Neverwhere," but is wholly its own creature.

There's enough here to keep a reader moving along. If your imaginative "inner voice" moves its lips when it reads, there can be a lot to enjoy. I found a few points grating, though, and a tighter story would have been a better one. It's good, though. Some readers will get a lot from this one.

//wiredweird, reviewing a complimentary copy

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Literary Floundering: Adrift in Deep Water with the Great White Non-Shark, May 13, 2007

By 

Fred V. Lowe Jr. (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel (Hardcover)

I got through the first 50 pages or so of this wannabe innovative novel not sure what I was on to, but the writing was good enough, the unfolding plot odd and exciting enough to spur me on. Midway along, I started to really like the story -- and then, a hundred pages further , I was not so sure any more. Quickly the read became a downhill slide. Although beautifully written and highly, intriguingly imagined, the book's qualities fail to disguise a fairly hackneyed plot: amnesiac victim of some unknown trauma must discover his past and present reality. But then, what IS reality? Pursued by a conceptual, man/mind-eating shark, our hero sets literal (or not literal?)sail to solve that always too-grand question.

Does he resolve his existential dilemmas? (Yes, there are several such dilemmas, which means there's at least one too many.) By the end, I didn't much care. I finished the book out of duty, hoping to the last the story would redeem itself. Alas not.

Hitchcock did it much, much better.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars An A for Effort!, July 7, 2007

By 

Brandon Whitfeld "caulfield0" (nyc) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Raw Shark Texts: A Novel (Hardcover)

Wow, this book comes in red AND blue! That's about as fascinating as I found this endeavor. I think the author didn't succumb to esoteric pretentiousness so much as simply fail to deliver an entertaining novel. I could feel a mighty effort though, and I almost liked him for sallying through with such an earnest attempt. I found the premise intriguing, the characters sympathetic, but I was bored by the dense tedium of the book's structure, disappointed when it didn't really follow through to anything memorable or conclusive, and found the prose self-conscious, the imagery strained, and the ideas ice-locked by some sort of sighing crush on HOUSE OF LEAVES, a much better and much more effective genre-splicing work of experimental fiction.