* Demanding and rewarding, lyrical and vernacular, smart and entertaining. Times Literary Supplement * Ricochets between the supernatural and the suburban throughout...the writing fizzes...This is true experimental writing: careless of taboo, teeming with ideas, elusive yet utterly controlled. Guardian * Bristling with wit and invention, these tales are full of hair-brained schemes, hair-raising moments, and incredibly close shaves...tongue-twisting wordplay, clipped dialogue and well-groomed characters ..These stories are all collector's items. Sunday Herald * The maniac energy of Kerouac pulses throughout the prose, but there is also a hallucinatory horror and hyper-realist constraint miraculously balanced in a manner which suggests the perfect fusion of Kafka and Kelman. The Scotsman

James Meek was born in London in 1962 and grew up in Dundee. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is his fourth novel. His previous book, The People's Act of Love (2005), won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the SAC Book of the Year Award, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into more than twenty languages.He has published two collections of short stories, Last Orders and The Museum Of Doubt, and contributed to the acclaimed Rebel Inc anthologies The Children Of Albion Rovers and The Rovers Return. He has worked as a journalist since 1985, and his reporting from Iraq and about Guantanamo Bay won a number of British and international awards. In the autumn of 2001 he reported for the Guardian from Afghanistan on the war against the Taliban and the liberation of Kabu