Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

by Geoff Dyer, Canongate, 304pp, £12.99, Week Bookshop £11.69 (incl. p&p) Geoff Dyer is "a writer's writer", said Tim Teeman in the Times. His "clever, erudite and dashing" books come plastered with praise from the likes of Michael Ondaatje, William Boyd, Alain de Botton and Zadie Smith (who hails him as "a postmodern Kingsley Amis"). In the first half of his new novel, Jeff Atman, a discontented freelance journalist, is sent to cover the Venice Biennale, where he attends various art openings and has a drug-fuelled love affair with a beautiful American woman; they part with no plans to meet again. The second half moves to Varanasi and also starts as a journalistic assignment – a travel piece about the holy city on the Ganges – but then turns into "some kind of spiritual quest". The unnamed narrator (presumably Jeff), loses interest in his old life and never comes home.

Dyer has written a "smart, provocative, often very funny, but ultimately deeply sobering" book, said Mick Brown in the Daily Telegraph. "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is an early contender for the most original and cleverest novel of the year." This "dazzling and peculiar novel" is certainly "wonderfully entertaining" and "frightfully funny", said Jan Morris in the Guardian. But for all its "virtuosity", it seems "stony at the heart".

LAST UPDATED 5:20 PM, APRIL 16, 2009