BOOK REVIEW | Billionaire's Banquet by Ron Butlin

Genre: Literary Fiction/Humour

Publication Date: 15th April 2017

My Rating: ★★★★

Goodreads Page

Link to Buy: Amazon

Goodreads Summary:

1985, Edinburgh. Thatcher's policies are biting deep - fat cats and street kids, lovers, losers and the rest struggle to survive. Hume sets up a business catering for the rich and their ever-growing appetites. But by the new millennium, these appetites have become too demanding.

Powerful, challenging and very funny, Billionaires' Banquet is an immortality tale for the 21st century.

About Ron Butlin

With an international reputation as a prize-winning novelist, RON BUTLIN is a former Edinburgh Makar/Poet Laureate. Now over to Ron -

Before becoming a writer, I was a pop-song lyricist (3 records and a brief appearance in a justly-neglected film. I was also a footman attending parties for the great and good, the rich and bad (see my forthcoming novel 'Billionaire's Banquet'), a barnacle-scraper on the Thames and a male model. My work has been widely translated, and 'The Sound of My Voice' has been twice been awarded a ‘Best Foreign Novel’ prize as well been made into a film, a rather short film.

I am a novelist, poet, children's author, opera librettist, playwright - one of these, on a good day. I have been auctioned twice for charity, and put in a cage outside parliament for The Day of the Imprisoned Writer. All very character-building. I have given readings world-wide including at the House of Lords, John Knoz's pulpit in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, and an Arab tent in Bahrain.

I live in Edinburgh with my wife, the writer Regi Claire, and our dog (Note - Nessie, as she's called in the book, features in my first novel for early teens, 'Steve & FranDan Take on the World' which is due out this spring. She is great fun on paper and in real life).

**No Spoilers**

I’m thrilled to be on the blog tour with Love Books Group for Billionaire's Banquet by Ron Butlin today and to have a spoiler-free review of the book to share. Thanks so much to the lovely Kelly from Love Books Group for sending me a copy of this book to review!

This book is a humorous literary fiction novel that follows an interesting group of Edinburgh students living in Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s: Hume, Cat, St Francis, DD and Electric Boy. All of them are dreaming of wonderful futures they think their lives will hold, while in the present they are enjoying the drink, fun, and shared accommodation of their youth. This is a very character-driven story and focuses mostly on their dreams and hopes. I loved Butlin's characters, they were so three-dimensional and well created. They were all equally flawed but also fascinating to follow. I especially enjoyed the female characters in the book as they were so vastly different and always reacted as I expected them to. Butlin is great at making a social commentary using his characters and that can be seen throughout this book.

One thing that I didn't expect, but still absolutely loved, with this book is the jump to present-day Edinburgh. It was so interesting to see the characters so many years later and to see how much the city and its inhabitants changed (or didn't change) in that time. There is so much dark humour woven within the story as it portrays the measures of 'success' through wealth and how the characters see themselves.

Having only been to Edinburgh a couple of times in my life, I wasn't able to fully appreciate the setting as much as I'd hoped. However, Butlin does create a vivid picture of many areas in the city and I found myself frequently looking them up to see where the characters were in relation to what I knew. I'm sure someone who knows Edinburgh more than me would really appreciate Butlin's beautiful descriptions of the city.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I found the characters to be incredibly engaging and the story kept me hooked as I wanted to know what happened next. I found this to be very reminiscent of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst so I would definitely recommend this book for anyone who was a fan of that! I will warn that there is explicit content in this book so if you're younger then please be aware of that!