She reminded us of Capote’s words: ‘rearrange the rules to suit yourself.’ You learn from the best, you bend the rules to suit your purposes, and you make them your own. With recurring themes of parenthood, secrets and painful reassessments of lives lived, Dunmore’s skill as an observer and chronicler of human behaviour shines throughout this final collection of her fiction. He seduced us [them] all with his words – and Truman knows full well the power of words. They’re both armour and weapon, the one thing he’s sure of. They alone have never failed him, their lyricism hinting at the beauty trapped within his stunted body, not to mention his conflicted soul.” The real skill of Swan Song is the kaleidoscopic portrait it paints of its raddled hero. The narrative moves through time from Capote’s tawdry childhood and friendship with Harper Lee to his withered end in Fu Manchu pyjamas. This is a first novel of extraordinary skill, a book of which Capote – even at his best – would have been proud.

Styan, J. L. (1984). All's Well that Ends Well. Manchester University Press. p.48. ISBN 9780719009990 . Retrieved 21 April 2019. Greenberg-Jephcott’s debut is fizzing with energy and ideas…The novel has style and substance in spades. ObserverGreenberg-Jephcott's debut is a devastating read that blurs the lines between vulnerability and narcissism; sex and power. And, ultimately, it is Capote's self-destruction that will have you racing breathlessly towards the end The Pool You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

This is a first novel of extraordinary skill, a book of which Capote would have been proud" -- Alex Preston * The Observer * We aren’t characters for your amusement, Truman. We’re women. Real women. And those are our lives you’re so casually scribbling. As well as Capote the real focus of this book (and sometime first party plural narrators) are his Swans: an inner circle of six privileged, glamorous women for whom he served as: firstly one of their trophies, adding literary genius to their collections of art, jewellery and famous friends; as an empathetic and alway flattering confidant to whom they confided both their juiciest gossip and their innermost secrets. As time went on, people started to say that they wanted to see Capote in the novel. Kelleigh went home, didn’t write for a week, and the day she had to submit for the next workshop she wrote a chapter about Truman as a child. A completely fascinating novel and a marvellously skillful re-imagining of real people, times and places. Outstanding." -- William BoydThere is much of interest here. Capote was a fascinating, damaged character. There are points in the story where you can pause and switch to YouTube to watch events being referred to (I would very much recommend watching the infamous interview on the Stanley Siegel show where Capote turned up high and rambled - it gives an insight into the state of his life and mind at that point in the story - if you have been reading this book prior to watching that clip, it is heartbreaking). While true that Proust's novel did include barely disguised portraits of real society figures, his reputation as perhaps the finest writer of the first half of the 20th Century rests not on that but on the quality of his prose. Similarly, with a very different but unique style of his own, Thomas Bernhard, the most important writer of the 2nd half of the century - his The Woodcutters even the subject of a lawsuit. I’ll start with what I did like. The book paints a portrait of a man from lonely beginnings, who seeks validation through his work, and his association with the rich and famous. There is tragic irony in the fact that his own thirst for attention causes him to betray the very people who give him companionship, threatening to leave him more alone than ever as he slips into a fugue of addiction and lies. The use of narrative voice is also interesting, the ‘swans’ narrating the story as a collective ‘we’. Over countless martini-soaked Manhattan lunches, they shared their deepest secrets and greatest fears. On exclusive yachts sailing the Mediterranean, on private jets streaming towards Jamaica, on Yucatán beaches in secluded bays, they gossiped about sex, power, money, love and fame. They never imagined he would betray them so absolutely.