Twelve - by Nick McDonell (Paperback)

About the Book

Sold to 14 publishers around the world and receiving tremendous critical acclaim, "Twelve" was one of the most significant literary debuts of the year. A chilling novel of urban adolescence that is "both an indictment of excess and a cry of teenage loneliness" ("People("), it has appeared on multiple bestseller lists.

Book Synopsis

Creating a sensation around the world when it was first published, Twelve established it's seventeen-year-old author as a powerful voice of the new millennium. The chilling novel follows prep school dropout White Mike through the week between Christmas and New Year's 1999, as he takes a year off to deal an alluring new drug to his privileged peers on Manhattan's Upper East Side. But Twelve is not a coming-of-age story, because its kids never had a childhood--their parents are off on holiday in Bali or business in Brussels, leaving hired help to look the other way as the kids stay home alone in their multimillion-dollar town houses, partying with drugs and sex and, in the end, much worse.

Review Quotes

"As fast as speed, as relentless as acid." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Nick McDonell is the real thing, a powerful young writer with the look of a dangerous freak and very sharp teeth. The ratio of age to talent is horrifying. His trick is he writes the truth. I'm afraid he will do for his generation what I did for mine."--Hunter S. Thompson

"An astonishing rush of a first novel, all heat and ice and inexorable narrative drive...A pleasure to read, a horror to contemplate, a real achievement." -Joan Didion

"McDonell is an authentic talent...His novel will endure as a snapshot of his generation as surely as Less Than Zero did of the eighties." -Stephanie Merritt, The Observer (London)

"[McDonell] renders Manhattan's cosseted Upper East Side with both the casual authority of an insider and the wry distance of an observer....Impressive." -Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review

"McDonell, like the young Jim Caroll, displays a frightening acuity in his astonishing debut." -Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair