London Book Award Nomination Geoff Dyer: 'It shilly-shallies aimlessly but also pricelessly. Therapy for Dyer, bliss for the reader.'

The Telegraph: “Watch the film before you read the book if you like. But it’s not compulsory, which says something of Dyer’s style... he is just as good gibbering on about nothing as he is in full analytical mode. Savour his description of being at the mercy of a tourist guide, his paean to the knapsack or his last-minute hesitation on whether it might not have been better to summarise another film. Zona, like Stalker, is a narrative without focus. It shilly-shallies aimlessly but also pricelessly. Therapy for Dyer, bliss for the reader.”

The sub-heading, A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room may not immediately entice the wandering bookshop browser towards Zona, but Geoff Dyer’s self-aware commentary on Tarkovsky’s film Stalker injects the story with humour, much-needed tangential segments and sex, says the Telegraph, and The Scotsman is equally enchanted “But what lingers is Dyer’s ability to convey that a great work of art – and Stalker is that – is both in and out of time simultaneously... The loveliness of Dyer’s book is that he could write it again in a decade and it would be different again.”

Dyer is now a Londoner, having been raised in Cheltenham and educated (on scholarship) at Oxford. He has published four novels and often contributes articles to our National Press, as well as the New York Times. In 2005 he became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was named GQ Writer of the Year in 2009.