Godspeed

A slow-burning and mesmerising read.

In this showdown between old ways and new money, Butler has produced both a finely tuned literary thriller and a portrait of small-town life as a Petri dish of hope and hubris.

A tense and twisting tale of class conflict and battling buddies that ends in spectacular fashion.

A study of male friendships, greed and the desire to make meaning.

Enthralling.

The writing is careful, considered; the story allowed to gradually spool out while tension builds quietly and relentlessly. It’s only after the explosion – sudden, shocking – that you realise every word prior had led inevitably to that moment . . . Godspeed manages to deliver a credible kind of redemption without compromising the book’s vivid and deeply earned sense of environmental, elemental and emotional realism.