The 25th Hour - Softcover

This character-driven crime novel is a spellbinding portrait of three friends confronting the consequences of their carefree youth on the streets of New York. (From the Publisher's Description)

Acerbically captivating first novel . . . Benioff creates a pungent, funny urban tableau full of shrewd operators and unfulfilled desires (New York Times)

As unusual as it is well wrought: it resonates with a Whitmanesque sense of the city's possibilities and unsatisfied longings (New Yorker)

David Benioff's headlong suspense novel is a deceptively simple chronicle of [Monty's] final day of freedom . . . Working in a novelistic form of "real time", Benioff shows a knack for critiquing his genre while revitalising its cliches . . . Instead of yielding mere irony, the author, in his first novel, achieves both pathos and excitement (Entertainment Weekly)

Brilliantly conceived, this gripping crime drama boasts dead-on dialogue, chiaroscuro portraits of New York's social strata and an inescapable crescendo of tension. Monty's solution to his agonising dilemmas will shock even hardened suspense lovers (Publishers Weekly)

This is a novel that stays with you a long time after reading it; it's not quite a crime novel, though there's crime in it, it's not quite a thriller, though aspects of it are certainly thrilling. It's atmospheric, thought-provoking, with wonderfully realised characters that fill Monty Brogan's life as he walks through the streets of snowy Manhattan in the last 24 hours before he goes to prison. It's a beautifully written yet very simple novel, and David Benioff is a writer to watch.