This book was a bit of a mess. It is two really separate stories in some ways (from different periods of a single character's life). Except I don't see the current character in the 10 year old character and vice-versa. The part of the story set in Las Vegas just goes nowhere as far as I can see and doesn't come to any conclusion. And the central mystery is just kind of pointless as well when you discover it. Not sure what I missed.

Note: due to the nature of this book, I'm going to avoid details as much as possible in the following rant. To the people who loved this book: please help, because I feel like I am missing something. I actually spent 30 minutes last night tossing and turning trying to figure out what I missed - and I came up with nothing. Zip. Nada. The writing was good, the pace excellent (I stayed up way too late last night finishing it), but that storyline, the plot? Didn't connect with it. I get it, it's all...

When he left the UK, Mark Wilkinson also left behind his name and entered the US as Joe Novak. By now, he is known as Mr Jones and selling apartments in Las Vegas. But something from his past is haunting him, he has episodes, hears voices or better: one voice: the one of Bethany, his girl-friend when he was still a teenager and living in England. He is thirty now and Bethany has been dead for thirteen years. He had wanted to leave their sad hometown together with her, to build a life together in...

An interesting concept and a great first half......yet somehow it doesn't feel right.The tale ends with more questions than answers - almost as if it is 2 stories that should intertwine but don't quite meet in the middle.

The author of last year’s excellent Ten Stories About Smoking returns with his first novel, which continues to explore how life may fall short of one’s dreams. Evers’ protagonist is Mark Wilkinson, who escaped his life in Cheshire and made it in America as ‘Joe Novak’; when we meet him in the early 2000s, he’s in Las Vegas , selling apartments at the ultra-high-end Valhalla complex. Alternate chapters chronicle a day in 1990 when Mark’s teenage girlfriend Bethany Wilder became a reluctant beauty...

I really enjoyed this book. Well-written and insightful. But I don't understand the ending. The big reveal scene in the pub garden with Hannah. Anyone? I feel like i skipped pages accidentally or something. I read a lot of books, but I'm confused. It feels a bit Atwood-ish but without the clues to piece together what was going on.

I have to note my annoyance first because this went from slight irritation to full on agitation by the end. Every paragraph a character was lighting a cigarette. It was almost as if the author got lazy and couldn't actually come up with a new character without shadowing his own obvious obsession with nicotine. I discovered after reading the book he has already written short stories about smoking, the man is truly addicted.Anyway back to the story, it was a disjointed read at first with the Las V...

Brilliant. Stuart Evers has contrived a truly original way of telling these two parallel – separate, but connected – stories, with distinct narrators and timelines, that I found completely engrossing once I was acclimatised to it. I raced through this in a little over a day. I unreservedly recommend it.I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Picador via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

This is one of the books i find occasionally . It reading as voyeurism . Its beautiful in parts but i never feel i am in the room or involved . some great writing some fantastic passages but i couldnt ever feel involved

I really liked the opening scene and the sense of loss that pervades the novel. The plot, however, never grabbed me.

Joe Novak is having a bit of a crisis. For the past few years he's been working at the Valhalla, a posh getaway where middle-aged rich men get to have all of their wishes granted and desires realized. Joe likes his job well enough and he's making good money, too--but he's also slowly losing his mind. He is haunted by his past, especially by the memory of his first love, Bethany. He's even starting to "see" and have involved conversations with her. His coworkers are worried about him, and Joe isn...

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Definitely the most interesting thing about Stuart Evers' new novel If This Is Home is the ultra-rich Las Vegas condo complex Valhalla where our narrator is working as the book opens, a great symbol for everything wrong with America right now: a glittering house of cards designed expressly to fleece the em...

This reminded me of the Catcher in the Rye or Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlisy - I enjoyed it thoroughly and read it in only four or five sittings - it was heart wrenching and enjoyable all in one and something I felt was easily relatable - I was drawn in effortlessly

So I've been a a bit prejudiced lately: I pine for long, luxurious, complicated sentences and words, more resplendent and evocative than the ideas they represent. With the exception of one author (dead now, unfortunately) I have found modern literature disappointing: short, direct sentences, uncomplicated and unoriginal plots, and frankly a lack of spark. Mr. Evers, as I intimated to my wife, has emerged (finally) as a "living" author I can truly say inspires me. This novel, though it started si...

I was bought this book by a friend, as a gift, who thought I might like it "as it's about someone who goes to live in America like you did". Hmmm......Anyway I read it, can't say I particularly enjoyed it but stuck with it to see it to the end. And the end .... was kind of weird. The story was all rounded up in the last couple of chapters, the ghost of his dead girlfriend came back to haunt him. He wrote their story down and went off into the sunset with his savior.....

Evers shares dark and anxious situations that can exist within marriages and within the child-parent relationships. The tension he skillfully creates took me by surprise initially, and then gradually won my admiration. Life on earth is not perfect. Everyone doesn't live happy-go-lucky lives.The dark tone reminds me of the line from Tolstoy: Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

----------"Las Vegas, you realize, runs not on money, but on the perniciousness of hope....Watching hope, and those that have it, destroys you."----------I wanted to like this one, It had a lot of very promising elements - a great plot (reinvented selves and the way our pasts always seem to catch us up), cool setting (the Valhalla is, literally, a dream come true for its visitors, strong writing (see the above quote). But somehow it never came together for me, and I found myself caring not one w...

There’s some good –or at least competent – writing here, but the author has made the mistake of writing two disparate storylines and then never letting them come together. Two books in one. Mark Wilkinson decides to leave his mundane small-town English life behind for a new start in the US. He finds himself in Las Vegas where he becomes involved in a truly surreal luxury complex named Valhalla. This section of the book is frankly weird and it’s a relief when he decides he needs to head back to E...

Strange, this book has so much potential but the author is trying to write too many stories at once. None of it felt finished, the characters are likeable but the first half of the book seems out of sorts from the second half. I did enjoy reading it though.

I came to this book with no prior knowledge of author or content other than 'young talent'. I was immediately caught up in twin narratives: the edgy and surreal Las Vegas real estate world to which Mark has 'escaped' and the fateful day Bethany his girlfriend was carnival queen 13 years earlier. The British small town mentality and lives of teenagers is brilliantly evoked in the latter. Evers is adept at detail, incident and back-story but it never feels superfluous or baggy. The second half of