This year's biggest publishing sensation

One part The Da Vinci Code, one part The Name of the Rose - A blazingly good yarn [and] an exceptional piece of scholarship ... A smart, swift, multitextured tale that both entertains and informs

The Da Vinci Code for people with brains

A stunning first novel ... if Scott Fitzgerald, Umberto Eco, and Dan Brown teamed up to write a novel, the result would be The Rule of Four. An extraordinary and brilliant accomplishment - a must read

An assured piece of fiction that weaves together the past and the present seamlessly ... I enjoyed it tremendously

A marvellous book with a dark Renaissance secret in its coded heart

A creepy chronicle of abuse, abandonment and unrequited love… So much here is brilliant

Everything we most want to know, the author quietly looks away from, until the story becomes as layered, contorted and interrupted as the collapsing architecture of Wreaking itself. Then time straightens out and speeds up suddenly… Everything connects. Everything comes to light. Everything is revealed, yet somehow the buckling of time induced by subjectivity, madness and metaphor makes it all just as hard to see

The question of what constitutes madness... is intelligently explored. Bold, grotesque, bawdy...memorable

Relentlessly inventive

Intensely imagined

Settings don’t come much more Gothic than Wreaking, the derelict, decaying...psychiatric hospital of James Scudamore’s striking third novel

This is the work of a writer totally at ease with, and confident in, his powers. A wonderfully assured novel with scope and ambition and with enough of a mystery at its heart to keep the reader hooked till the end

We are left with the characters in our heads for days, and the sense of unease that Scudamore cleverly conjures up

A twisted, unsettling tale of family lies and lonely souls

An immersion in the physical and psychic ruins of a contemporary Britain which enchants and disturbs, lures and repels. The inner poetry and descriptive mastery of James Scudamore's Wreaking are riches which cannot be forgotten. If you only read one novel in coming times, make it this astonishing and deeply moving chronicle

This is an impressive work from the critically acclaimed author of Heliopolis