This is the best book I’ve read all year. A masterpiece. Price’s characters are electrifying and so human. They linger and linger. Price is probably best known for an earlier book, Clockers, and his work writing scripts for HBO’s “The Wire.”

If you loved “The Wire,” I bet you will love Lush Life.

From Russell Banks:

With Lush Life, Richard Price has become our postmodern Balzac. Except that he’s a whole lot funnier than Balzac and writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around, living or dead. He’s a writer I hope my great-grand children will read so they’ll know what it’s like to be truly alive in the early twenty-first century.

From Francine Prose:

Price writes with the slightly manic desperation of someone determined to tell the absolute truth…This heightened, anxious awareness of moral and psychological complexity…..is one of the great accomplishments of first rate writing.”