Product Details
Only Forward

Only Forward
By Michael Marshall Smith

List Price: £6.99
Price: £2.36

Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Dispatched from and sold by the_book_depository

34 new or used available from £2.25

Average customer review:

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #18251 in Books
  • Published on: 1998-07-06
  • Original language: English
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 320 pages

Editorial Reviews

Synopsis
Stark lives in Colour, a neighbourhood whose inhabitants like to be co-ordinated with their surroundings. Then there's Red close by: if you want to see a tactical nuclear battle recreated as a sales demonstration. Stark has friends in Red, which is just as well because something is about to happen.

Customer Reviews

Great book5
Simply a great read - you will not want to put the book down till the end, and I promise you will then tell everyone how great it is and they wont listen - till they actually read it themselves.

His first key release. Start here then buy the rest. Enjoy.



Started off interesting...3
This one started off interesting but gradually ended up cliched with a rather dull payoff. Some of the reviews suggested it had a pretty big payoff at the end but it wasn't the case!

Funny, elegiac and moving5
Only Forward tells the story of Stark, all round nice guy and problem-solver extraordinaire. Stark is asked to locate a missing Actioneer, apparently kidnapped from the Action Centre, home to the sort of dynamic go-getters who'd think of a lifetimes indenture to McKinsey as a shortcut to heaven. Stark's mission takes him to Colour (where the dress code is time-dependent and rigorously enforced), Red (bring your CRUNT launcher), Stable, Turn, Fnaph, and many other of the eccentric Neighbourhoods making up his fractured home city.

Smith's language is superb, moving from witty dialogue to compelling descriptions of the increasingly disturbed landscape of the city and its dismal seashore `to muted colours and grey pebbles endlessly made cold by the ebb and flow of heavy water ... the place where it was most clearly dead because it was still there ...' Stark's life is beautifully and obliquely revealed as the book progresses.

Only Forward is by turns funny, exciting, thoughtful and, towards the end, sad and ironic. It is one of my favourite books, and I highly recommend it.