“If Raymond Chandler and Italo Calvino had collaborated on a road movie script the result might have been somewhat similar.” Sunday Telegraph
Walker is at a party where he meets Rachel. Two days later she turns up at his apartment. However it’s not Walker she wants , but her husband Malory who has gone missing. She wants Walker to find him. So begins this strange, beautiful, road-movie of a novel that takes the hero across the vast landscape of middle America on the trail of a man he has never met. And as Walker’s search grows in its weird intensity it seems that somebody else is following, searching for him too.
“A short, brilliant novel, The Search offers more in 150 pages than most books twice that length.” Guardian
“As elegant as a mathematical theorem correctly expressed.” Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times
“Phrases such as ‘postmodernist’, ‘film noir’ and ‘road movie’ will hover about this book in every review, as if writers had never used their minds’ eyes until the cinema came along. Besides Dyer’s talent for creating atmosphere, his economy with dialogue, he has an independent sense of structure that produces little in the way of recognisable plot. That contrariness, that refusal to resolve questions, will irritate those who suspect that Dyer’s challenging insights and studies of contemporary culture are compromising his storytelling; but he treads the fine line carefully, aware of the oddest of literary contradiction: we love the writer who tellss a story, but we trust the writer who remembers that’s all it is.’ Glyn Maxwell, Vogue
“Dyer’s surreal, hypnotic narrative confirms his status as one of Britain’s most original, inventive young writers.” New Woman
“Dyer injects an almost magical randomness into what ought to be the most conventional of tales, and gives us Surrealism where we might have expected Dirty Realism… It is a vivid and puzzling alternative to the everyday, and its after-image is hard to erase.” Erica Wagner, Spectator
“One of the best thriller scenarios I’ve ever read.” Tom Hiney, Independent
“A compelling tale in the road-move tradition… The pace is fast and the description so vivid it’s almost cinematic. Great stuff.’ Company Magazine
First published: UK, Hamish Hamilton, 1993
Current paperback edition: Abacus