Their Lips Talk Of Mischief - Softcover

Adorning the cover ... is a picture of a decrepit typewriter missing multiple letters - a fitting image for a novel that thrives on exploring the gaps in narratives. For amid the lips talking of mischief, Warner also subtly mines the silences in relationships, in a story that resonates poignantly with that which remains unsaid. (Paperback of the Week The Observer)

[G]litteringly explosive ... the perfect summer read. (The Times)

[T]his craftily engineered and winningly nostalgic novel is at last a story of lost illusions. It ends in a flash-frame of aporia, an impossible decision to be made: in lesser hands this might feel like a copout, but Warner knows exactly what he is doing. (Guardian)

Warner has always been the contemporary Scottish writer most interested in literary style; combining slangy, stylised speech with a baroque phrasing and syntax, he is incapable of writing a dull book. (The List)

Moving, funny, richly peopled and written with great gusto. (Financial Times)

[O]ne of Scotland's best, a writer who has begun to create his own, often surreal, imaginative world out of the flotsam and jetsam - the detritus - of modern life. (Robert McCrum The Observer)

[An] ebullient but underlyingly sombre book. (Sunday Times)

Their Lips Talk of Mischief paints a sharp picture of deception, obsession and love. It encourages runaways to look forwards rather than backwards, yet never discloses its journey's end. It shows Warner at his finest, all his talents in cahoots. (Scotland on Sunday)

Their Lips Talk of Mischief is that rare thing - a book about books that will actually appeal to those without literary doctorates ... this is a novel that rises above its meta self-reflexiveness to cover frustrated ambition, friendship, desire, love - and a good deal of sex ... Warner has a peculiar eye for detail that is delightful and disturbing. (We Love This Book)

High up in the Conrad Flats that loom bleakly over Acton, two future stars of the literary scene - or so they assume - are hard at work, tapping out words of wit and brilliance between ill-paid jobs writing captions for the Cat Calendar 1985 and blurbs for trashy novels with titles like Brothel of the Vampire. Just twenty-one but already well entrenched in a life eked out on dole payments, pints and dollops of porridge and pasta, Llewellyn and Cunningham don't have it too bad: a pub on the corner, a misdirected parental allowance, and the delightful company of Aoife, Llewellyn's model fiancee, mother of his young baby - and the woman of Cunningham's increasingly vivid dreams. Alan Warner's superb new novel sees the author of Morvern Callar at the top of his game.