Press Releases
Ben Masters’s remarkable debut Noughties–lively, erudite, and heartfelt–announces the arrival of a major new talent.
A modern coming-of-age story full of style, humor, and insight from twenty-five-year-old Cambridge doctoral candidate Ben Masters
Noughties: A Novel
Ben Masters
- Imprint: Hogarth
- On sale: October 9, 2012
- Price: $23.00
- Pages: 304
- ISBN: 9780307955661
212-572-2098
dmessina@randomhouse.com
UK Praise for NOUGHTIES
“All-singing, all-dancing style, full of flourishes and wordplay. A genuine comic talent.” —Daily Mail
“Lively…Funny and tender…A caustic, street-smart novel for our times.” —Financial Times
“[Noughties] is intelligent and entertaining and, like early Martin Amis, it is an attempt to
say something honest and even modest under a flashy, stylistic surface.” —Sunday Times
“If you’ve been to university recently, this confident debut will infuriate you, make you laugh, trigger lots of nostalgia, and leave you with a knowing smile.” —Time Out London
The end of college days is a bittersweet experience that many will remember—the excitement of entering the “real” world, along with all the trepidation of embarking upon that vague thing called “adulthood.” Ben Masters has written a novel that perfectly captures this fraught moment, and the result is his remarkable debut NOUGHTIES (Hogarth; October 9, 2012), a heartfelt, modern coming-of-age story full of style, humor, and insight.
NOUGHTIES is set over the course of one night. Our narrator, Eliot Lamb, is out with his friends at the King’s Arms, making preparations for their familiar descent: pub, bar, club. Pints in hand, shots at the ready, it would seem like any other night except for the specter hanging over everyone’s head—in the morning, everything must change. This is the group’s last celebration before they all graduate from Oxford, and through all the laughs and cheers, it’s a fact they’re each struggling to come to terms with. For Eliot, this evening is proving to be a particularly seminal moment. He’s decided that the time has finally arrived to reveal his true feelings for Ella, the classmate he’s long been pining for, but ominous text messages from his ex-girlfriend back home are threatening to unravel him. With each drink, a new memory comes rushing to the fore, and Eliot begins to relive his riotous time at Oxford: the mistakes, the heartache, not to mention all of that inscrutable reading that he just doesn’t know what to do with—and the tragic secret he’s been hiding this whole time. With dawn and his unknown future creeping up on him, Eliot must make a reckoning with the past and the fact that he’s about to embark on a new chapter in life—whether he wants to or not.
In Eliot, Masters has crafted a wonderfully complex, three dimensional, and interestingly flawed character who embodies the vulnerabilities and anxieties—as well as some of the more regrettable and cringe-worthy aspects—of young adulthood. Released in the UK this past spring to much acclaim, Masters has been compared to Martin Amis, NOUGHTIES introduces a remarkable new talent to the literary world.
About the Author
BEN MASTERS is twenty-five years old. He was born in Northampton and graduated from Oxford in 2010. Noughties is his first novel.
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