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Please: A Novel
In short, sharp episodes, Please chronicles the life of a young man who drifts through a hallucinatory urban world filled with celebrity wannabes, addictive relationships and jobs that demand he become someone else. The only thing he cares about is finding his ex-wife, who seems to exist only in his memories now. This terse, savage debut fuses the quiet desperation of Raymond Carver with the absurdity and media-savvy irony of Quentin Tarantino. At the same time, Please has a compassionate heart: It's a moving portrait of one man's attempt to embrace something real in his life. Here's an X-ray of our times from a writer of extraordinary restraint, skill and wit.

To download Please for free or to read it online, click here.

Press

"Hilarious social satire of daily life among the young and nihilistic ... a winner of a debut"

-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Darbyshire plumbs the murky regions of the soul in a novel of dark brilliance."

-Booklist

"a consummate critique of all the creeping human weaknesses, counterfeit values and trend-driven desires that steadily erode our hopes for meaning and purpose"

-The Globe and Mail

"It's like an episode of Seinfeld in which all the characters are George ... it's must-read TV"

-CTV

"like sitting with Charles Bukowski in Edward Hopper's diner"

-The Ottawa Citizen

"In these portraits of urban dementia, Darbyshire's spare, wry writing has pleasing echoes of Frederick Barthelme (albeit with a greater penchant for slapstick) and Chuck Palahniuk (minus the rage)"

-eye weekly

"Darbyshire writes short stories like Eddie Van Halen plays guitar: full out. His sentences are packed with power chords and lightning riffs. Please contains some of the best sentence by sentence writing I've read in a good long while."

-The Danforth Review

"Please is dark and funny, and if you read it, you might never want to fall in love again"

-Uptown Magazine

"Please is a wry and quick and screamingly wild look at an underground culture of aimlessness and emotional loss. It is about the spaces between people, but also about the beauty of the spaces between words. Darbyshire is that rare breed of writer who knows how and when to pause. Please is absolutely stunning."

-Michelle Berry, author of Blur