SAINT OF THE CITY's Reviews
"I immediately loved this book.... David’s command of language, and his perfectly gothic vision of a charming psycho carving his way through a
contemporary Dublin swathed in the blue smoke of a million cigarettes, chimed perfectly with the meomory of both Gavin Friday’s haunted dancehalls and
the bright eyes of Pat McCabe’s pig-slaughtering youth. Could this be the impossible lovespawn of Mr Pussy and Da Brady run amok? It is certainly noir
fiction with both poise and purpose, not something you can really have too much of in the contemporary canon. A scaborous little tale, swift and compulsive
in the telling, which manages to pack a lot of points into a svelte amount of pages."
"The distinctly French sensibility which permeates David Noone’s incisive and insightful Saint of the City is due to a combination of all of the
above-mentioned ingredients, along with ‘a charming psycho’, of a narrator who’s more than happy to recount his current life anecdotes with a tone of
unflinching honesty and unrepentant black humour. If Baudelaire had written a crime novella, Saint of the City would be that book.
"Riddled with malaise, the acid-gargling tone of the narrator combined with the brisk narrative pace and overall atmosphere of soul-doom and
claustrophobia are sure to find favour with fans of Whatever. Indeed, though never derivative, a sense of diseased fellowship pervades, as if Georges
Bataille were reciting passages from Mark SaFranko’s 'Max Zajack' novels while listening to early Nick Cave at full blast.
--- Cathi Unsworth, from the introduction to Saint of the City
Saint of the City is a serious, darkly comic work of fiction, and is well-worth reading – more than once."
--- R.J. Dent, Word Press
"There are books which lay flowers beneath the reader to make the experience of reading as comfortable as possible; and then there are books like
'Saint of the City', which prefer instead to throw down a carpet of broken glass and leave their mark in the shape of a bootprint across your face.
For all its relative brevity, the tremors left behind are visceral and unsettling."
--- Christopher Broadsword, Empty Mirror