Good god this book took me months to finish!

Admittedly I was reading other books alongside this one, but still.

Eureka by Antony Quinn was a slow burner for me, but it got better and better in the second half where everything seemed to click and the pace quickened.

This novel feels like an immersive experience as we follow the characters around swinging London; taking acid, smoking weed, drinking and having sex.

There is more to it than that, though.

The plot revolves around Nat, a screenwriter who hasn’t had a hit in a while, an actress looking for her big break, a German film director Reiner Werther Kloss, and a journalist who’s trying to solve multiple instances of arson.

The unusual and highly effective structural device that Quinn uses here is to embed the actual movie script that Nat is working on within the pages of the novel, so that we see the script as the movie is being developed.

As I said, it started off a bit slow and took a while for me to get hooked, but that was partly my fault as I was reading other books alongside this one, and it kinda got pushed to the side.

The characters really leap off the page and I felt as if I were right there in 60’s London with them.

Groovy!

Not so much recreates that heady era as reinhabits it…There’s something Evelyn Waugh-like about Eureka… Few eras have been as well documented, but Eureka succeeds in bringing it to life in a new and hugely entertaining way.

Independent