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Lights Out in Wonderland: A Novel Kindle Edition

4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 115 ratings

"Lights Out in Wonderland has all the verbal wit and energy of Vernon God Little."—Financial Times


Gabriel Brockwell—aesthete, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent—is thinking terminal. He's decided to kill himself—but not immediately. His destination is Wonderland. The style of the journey is all that's to be decided.



Traveling between London, Tokyo, and Berlin, Gabriel is in search of the bacchanal to obliterate all previous parties. His adventure takes in a spell in rehab, a near-death experience eating a poisonous Japanese delicacy, and finally an orgiastic feast in the bowels of Berlin's majestic Tempelhof Airport. Along the way, Gabriel falls apart, only to reemerge with a new outlook on the world and a mission to right his past wrongs.



Lights Out in Wonderland is an allegorical banquet, a sly commentary on these End Times and the march toward banality, and a joyful expression of the human spirit.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"If any novelist can collate the killing irony of what is happening around us it is DBC Pierre."
The Guardian

About the Author

DBC Pierre’s first novel, Vernon God Little, won the Man Booker Prize. His other novels include Ludmila's Broken English and Lights Out in Wonderland. He lives in County Leitrim, Ireland.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005B0CTLC
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (August 8, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 8, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 827 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 356 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 039334925X
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 115 ratings

About the author

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D. B. C. Pierre
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DBC Pierre was a late surprise or an accident (depending on who you ask), for a bomber-pilot-turned-scientist, and an air-traffic-controller-turned-pianist with an all-female swing band, in Australia in 1961. Barely two years later, Pierre's father (who had christened him Peter, though it didn't stick past his teens) shot a picture of his child in Washington, USA, for the cover of Pierre's first novel, Vernon God Little, which went on to win the Man Booker Prize.

Except his father hadn't known where the picture would end up, and it took thirty-six more years for Pierre to write the novel, or to even realise he had to write a novel. In those intervening years he had grown up in Mexico - or had made an unconvincing attempt at it - had lived in half a dozen countries besides, had gotten into trouble and gotten back out of it, had been a cartoonist, a photographer, a designer and filmmaker, had been sniped with a gun by his neighbour (they were friends after that), had virtually died in a terrible car accident, and had been bitten by a vampire bat. And that all generated a pile of observations and feelings.

All that combustion has to go somewhere, so it goes into books. Pierre takes special pleasure in breathing life into his writing, all the curious laws of personal physics, of mad contemporary life, that nobody can really explain; and he particularly loves the magical meeting of minds between writer and reader, sharing adventures together in silence.

There's a corner on a street at sundown, a spat at a battered table, an epiphany after some dusty caper resolves in one of his works - where he hopes to meet you too.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
115 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2014
    DBC PIERRE is one of my favourite writers and why not? I wish there were many more of his books available. His subtle humour and distinct characterisation leads his narrative, a story everyone can relate to. Please write some more!!
  • Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2013
    With the exception of what seems like a hastily-written section two thirds of the way through, Lights Out In Wonderland (LOW) is a superb book. It is not only a white-water read in the traditional DBC Pierre style, but some passages are so lyrical, and so taut, that they stand out as among the best I've ever read.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2016
    my favorite book in a few years
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2014
    DBC Pierre is a genius.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2010
    Wow. What a blitzkrieg.

    As the last ripples fan to the edge of the pool, and DBC Pierre's "loose trilogy" bids the world adieu, you wonder whether he's not having trouble letting go: at least three blind summits come and go before you finally get there (I was well and truly ready for it) and even then, after the curtain has fallen, DBC seems reluctant to sign off, calling from the wings, supplying rules of interpretation and further clues to the hermeneutic after the final whistle.

    You sure as hell need them, and that's no compliment from a traditionalist sort of a chap who believes a novel should stand or fall on its text as presented. I don't think you could say that in a million years about Lights Out in Wonderland, which raves and rambles all over the place, like a stream- of-consciousness fire hose that's been let go: it is bombastic, articulate, erudite, esoteric and often funny, but all the same it's a mess, it is incoherent, and I have absolutely no idea what Pierre's point was in writing it.

    Narrator Gabriel Brockwell plays like something between Rik from Comic Strip's The Young Ones and Richard E. Grant's character in Withnail And I (correct: neither are likeable figures) - by turns a fruitlessly over-educated dilettante and a selfish, hypocritical prig. Despite being on the end of telling damnations from characters as he goes (his father, his flatmate, his girlfriend, and various Germans) - these are the most coherent and biting passages in the book - Gabriel sees the world as everyone else's problem, and has resolved to kill himself.

    Being a self-described epicurean, philosopher and poet (Pierre appears to share this view: I'd describe Gabriel more narrowly as just a bit of a git) Gabriel wishes to end on a "nimbus" high (you sort of have to just imagine what this might be - he says "Whoosh" a lot) and so instead of quickly topping himself (which would have suited me fine) he effortlessly and implausibly glides, leaving a trail of utter destruction in his wake, from his voluntary sectioning in a mental hospital in the south of England via his London flat to precipitating an unfortunate death in a haute cuisine restaurant in Tokyo and organising an End-of-Days banquet in the soon to be derelict Tempelhof airport - once a jewel in the Nazi crown - at the centre of Berlin.

    His plan is to organise a Bacchanalian feast, spring his compadre from a Japanese gaol and finally, victoriously, buy the farm.

    Why this trajectory? Your guess as good as mine. Coherence doesn't seem to be a high priority for Pierre who, without so much as a by your leave, introduces characters, dilemmas and problems and just as casually jettisons them (or perhaps plain forgets about them) as he goes. It feels like this novel was written in a single, drug fueled blitz.

    For all that the book remains surprisingly engaging. I got to the end, and I'm prone to binning books like this. It's so bombastic in style you can only get through it at pace, by aquaplaning, and at that pace there are consolations, though twenty four hours after putting the book down it's hard to recall what these are.

    The final feast descends at the end into something resemblent of Caligula (no doubt Pierre would point instead to The Satyricon) - blackly comic, I suppose, if more than a little queasy - but I closed the book wondering what its point was, other to show off its author's obvious erudition and make the point, which hardly needed this industry, that we live in banal times.

    Pierre is able and willing to descend into gothic depravity, but he isn't funny enough and nor is his satire pointed enough to make his self indulgence worth the read.

    Olly Buxton
    13 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2011
    The Kindle version is crappy, with the footnotes that are supposed to be on almost every page consigned to the end of each chapter. Even if you could be bothered to flip back and forth (painful on a Kindle) there's no easy way to know which note goes with which page, as they are all labelled "*"!

    As soon as it is fixed and they've told me, I'll amend this review, but until then, DO NOT DOWNLOAD!

    Next day...OK, it's not as bad as I thought. Each of those little "*"s is in fact a link to the footnote at the end of the chapter. Makes sense. However, this is still pretty crappy, as it means that on almost every page you have to do lots of button pushing to get to the link, read it, and then go back. As these notes aren't really optional (they are part of the narritive and not intended to be missed out) then this still make the book paianful to read. Why aren't these comments either a) at the bottom of the page as intended, or b) if this is not technically possible, then inserted in square brackets, indented, italicised, whatever, in line with the text? Upgraded review by 1* but still annoying.

    Ps Third of the way thought the book and enjoying it none-the-less!
    6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

  • ashish
    4.0 out of 5 stars Old book. Great content.
    Reviewed in India on May 6, 2017
    The book is old with a little bit of yellow staining on the pages as well as the cover being ceased on all corners. The packaging itself isn't something of quality with an old plastic crudely covering the book. But the content of the book deserves the rating. If content is what you care for and like me, old books are welcome to you I would recommend this product.
  • jerry ludd
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in Canada on May 29, 2015
    Whoosh. A masterful piece of literature to the highest calibre.
  • neuronslikebrandy
    5.0 out of 5 stars You will miss your bus stop
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 24, 2012
    An absolutely stunning book. It manages to flawlessly mirror the time in which we
    live, but also say things that will not age. It's got beautiful passages that had me
    folding pages over to come back to them. The imagery had me window shopping for
    aeroplane tickets to every place described. There are beautiful little stories thrown in
    with the narrative that you'll be telling your friends about after you've read them. For
    example the master winemakers who are so dedicated to their craft that they never
    leave the vineyard, and encourage young lovers to copulate amongst the vines. Or
    the nightclubs in East Berlin that gave out entry tokens when the wall came down
    which are still be used today.

    The novel is about a society reaching its apex, and the excesses that involves. There
    just is not a better author out there to describe this stuff. The pace is extraordinary.
    The descriptions of food, wine and pharmaceuticals jump off the page and down your
    throat. The lights blind you. It's like a life taking place in a fairground, which I suppose
    is what the title is getting at. It's DBC Pierre, so expect drugs and bodily fluids;
    sometimes all at once. It's not the focus of the novel but if you don't enjoy writing of
    this nature, this is probably not for you.

    My only criticism is this: the climaxes in the plot are so dizzyingly high and so
    numerous that the moments in between feel a little flat in comparison. In this way, the
    novel is a victim of its own success. Climaxes are where DBC Pierre eats; perhaps
    the other stuff does not excite him. The finale does not disappoint though, and the
    final third of the book is where the book reaches its cruising speed. The ending
    leaves you feeling satisfied.

    Another criticism levelled at this novel is that the world view of the protagonist
    is immature. "Undergraduate" as one newspaper put it. What this misses is that
    this is deliberate - he is a wealthy anti-capitalist in his mid twenties, with all the
    contradictions that brings. He is an incomplete person and his philosophy reflects
    this. Perhaps these reviewers think they are reading the author's manifesto, but why?
    It also makes me think that these reviewers did not finish the novel, because without
    giving too much away, the character does not end the journey as he starts it.

    Vernon God Little won the Booker, but I actually prefer Lights Out in Wonderland.
    It's everything good about the first book, but MORE. Read it. You might not like
    everything about it, but you won't regret the experience.
  • Tejas Nair
    3.0 out of 5 stars Received an Old Copy
    Reviewed in India on December 15, 2015
    I received an old copy with plastic covering. Pages were yellow and the covers had dogears. However, this is the only edition available.
  • gooch
    4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 30, 2014
    Interesting story, excellently written, true to life, great author. Funny, sad, charming, a story you want to tell people about.

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