Description

‘A dazzling and savage first novel’ New York Times

Angels tells the story of two born losers. Jamie has ditched her husband and is running away with her two baby girls. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime. They meet on a Greyhound bus and decide to team up.

So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark underbelly of America – the bars, bus stations, mental wards and prisons that play host to Jamie and Bill as they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral though rape, alcohol, drugs and crime, to madness and death.

From the author of Tree of Smoke, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Publisher Review

Johnson succeeds so well as to make one eager for more -- John Sutherland * London Review of Books * A beautifully tragic chronicle * New York Magazine * Denis Johnson is one of our most inventive, unpredictable novelists * New York Times Book Review * Johnson knows his people inside out, their lost, lonely, never-had-a-chance lives. He knows how they talk and think, and he makes us know them too * Publishers Weekly * One of the strongest examples of fiction noir since Robert Stone's first work appeared-with an absence of sentimentality and an overall shape that's perfectly judged, this is one of the most impressive first novels of recent seasons - full of a fiery recoiling kick, the dreadful power of inhuman ugliness and misfortune beyond redemption * Kirkus Reviews *