Occupied City - Tapa blanda

"An extraordinary and highly original crime novel . . . A truly remarkable work. It is hugely daring, utterly irresistible, deeply serious and unlike anything I have ever read." --Justin Cartwright, "New York Times Book Review"
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"Like the novels of Stieg Larsson, Peace's books are fueled by political passion . . . Genuinely hypnotic . . . It's no wonder that several critics have compared its mood to Eliot's "The Waste Land."" --"Harper's"
"Hypnotic postmodern noir of almost unrivaled fury. . . . Expect to be enthralled and maybe amazed. . . . ["Occupied City"] takes no prisoners." --"Los Angeles Times Book Review"
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"A genre-busting mystery and meditation on the ambiguity of elusive reality . . . Peace writes with boatloads of style. . . . This backdrop [of post-war Tokyo] shows how deliberate, bold, and deadly serious Peace is." --"Austin American-Statesman"
""Occupied City "quickly became my favorite Peace novel . . . This is a true literary thriller, haunting psychological crime fiction exquisitely penned." --Helen Thorpe, "Largehearted Boy "(blog)
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"A heart-thumping experimental novel which bursts the bounds of the usual genre categories . . . Exhilarating." --"Seeing the World Through Books "(blog)
"This is a savagely beautiful, richly startling novel . . . The raw beauty of Peace's language envelops you . . . Peace writes brilliantly of shattered roads, shattered lives, a fragmenting self, fragmenting society . . . He is an astonishing storyteller."--"The Times "(UK)
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"Peace's breathtaking skill renders all [the voices] vividly, forcefully alive . . . His pulp-modernist style feels honed and refined to scalpel-sharp efficiency . . . Peace is like a fearsome tornado turning the world on its head--and we should be grateful for him." --"Financial Times "
"A marvellous book . . . You will occasionally feel glad as you read that nobody else writes like Peace, but you will put down the book amazed and delighted that at least one person does." --"Daily Telegraph" (UK)
"Peace doesn't simply examine wartime Japan's dark heart. He punches through the rib cage to rip it out, vivisect it, and write page after hallucinatory page in its hot, black blood . . . "Occupied City" is a gripping crime story, too . . . My copy of "Occupied City" won't be going anywhere near a second-hand bookshop." --"Independent "(UK)
""Tokyo Year Zero" was a gripping performance [but] "Occupied City" [is] a tighter read, with greater momentum, than its predecessor . . . The novels Peace produces are uncommonly serious about the nature of the tissues that bind together history, rumour, politics, psychology, community and fiction. At their best, they develop a kind of literary forensics, exhuming histories of violence to probe the necrotised organs of the societies in which that violence erupts . . . Peace wields the scalpel like no one else." --"Observer" (UK)

'We all know what this could be: we know it could be dysentery, we know it could be typhoid. In the Occupied City, we all know what this could mean -'

Tokyo, January 26th, 1948. As the third year of the US Occupation of Japan begins, a man enters a downtown bank. He speaks of an outbreak of dysentery and says he is a doctor, sent by the Occupation authorities, to treat anyone who might have been exposed.

Clear liquid is poured into sixteen teacups. Sixteen employees of the bank drink this liquid according to strict instructions. Within minutes twelve of them are dead, the other four unconscious. The man disappears along with some, but not all, of the bank's money. And so begins the biggest manhunt in Japanese history.

In Occupied City, David Peace dramatises and explores the rumours of complicity, conspiracy and cover-up that surround the chilling case of the Teikoku Bank Massacre: of the man who was convicted of the crime, of the legacy of biological warfare programmes, and of the victims and survivors themselves.

The second part of his acclaimed Tokyo Trilogy - and an extraordinary picture of a city in mourning - Occupied City is further evidence of a singular and formidable novelist.