‘The Absent Therapist is a miniature but infinite novel, and unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s just achingly good.’
     – Luke Kennard

‘These are gripping narratives, with intriguing shifts of register, but they are also technically experimental and daring. Each sentence is weighed, poised. The intelligence with which Will Eaves handles language is modest and rare. The absent therapist is the listening reader to whom this compelling book is a fabulous gift.’
     – Patricia Duncker

2014 Goldsmiths Prize short list

The whole book is like someone deeply charismatic and charming daring you not to find them insane. It’s wonderful.’
     – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian (full review here)

‘The pieces in The Absent Therapist often resound with truth, whether the overheard voice is that of a plumber offering to redo another tradesman’s botched job (“I won’t charge you no extra. I’m already saving you money!”), a Londoner describing spanking in a gay club, or a businessman losing his listener’s interest by spouting jargon about bridge documents, tech guys and new gen stuff. The fragments range across continents – America, Africa, Australia – as well as classes, and many of them are clearly situated ... Others are decontextualised, and often these are the most arresting, either for their meditative quality or through a poetic suggestiveness which reminds us that Eaves is a poet as well as a writer of prose fiction.’
     – Alison Kelly, Times Literary Supplement

‘Will Eaves has written novels – but also poetry. And here, with The Absent Therapist, he seems to aim (and reside) somewhere between the two. These are short narratives, some just one line long, nothing over a page and a half; snapshots, overheard conversations, different voices huddling in around one another. There’s very little comfort from the huddle too …
   The observations are startling – brilliant. And so often very funny. Eaves is able to mock and celebrate the truly bizarre, unique existence of the human being; that weird thing called family. How we can’t ever truly know what any one other person is thinking, and that thinking we might is often the biggest insult if not a mistake.
   But he also allows himself space to simply make some great jokes, cold, harsh, hilarious … Sex is one of the preoccupations treated as merely a theme, albeit a recurring one. Eaves has a lot of fun using sex, or discussion of it, and around it, as background prop or foreground distraction. It’s sometimes the unspoken issue, his characters reveal so much about mindsets, their own, the author’s too – many of the pieces have a memoir feel to them – and yet sometimes we end up drawn to, or go back to revisit and understand the bits that were left out.
   There’s also a lot of talk around why we’re here – and where, in fact, we are. And it’s here, distilling heady philosophy and both dressing up and unpacking obfuscations that we get to see Eaves’ great poetic strengths and sensibility.
   … there are several read-aloud moments, many of the pieces excerpt well. But the accumulative power of this book – of taking it all in, seeing not a hair out of place, sensing a strange and powerful madness within and around the writing and selecting of these pieces, the placement – is when you really see the magic. The writing is technically flawless, vivid, cruel and wonderful. It’s so often as good as it gets.
   Whatever this is – whether novel/anti-novel or just a twisted stop-start journey of nearly short-stories – it’s a mini-masterpiece. And it contains – or is barely able to contain and control – multitudes.’
     – Simon Sweetman, Off the Tracks


From reviews of This Is Paradise (2012):

‘Eaves’s writing is so beautiful and extraordinary that mundane events bristle with oddity’ – The Times

‘Economy is essential, and [Eaves] does economy with great style, establishing and situations with cameo scenes and sharp dialogue . . . The events are those climactic moments of life that lie forever in the mind, each of them summoned up with deft precision’
– Penelope Lively, Guardian

Will Eaves is the author of three novels (most recently, This Is Paradise, Picador, 2012) and a collection of poems (Sound Houses, Carcanet, 2011). He was Arts Editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1995 to 2011, and now teaches at Warwick University