Overview: ‘You Complete The Masterpiece,’ from author Guy Mankowski is part jet-setting thriller, part literary puzzle, and part very contemporary indictment of corruption.

Verdict: Millennial author Jude is lost in obscurity until he’s saved by an award bequeathed by Alberto Valdez, the highly controversial surrealist Spanish author who first inspired him to write. But given Valdez’s unsolved disappearance, the motives behind his giving Jude the award are a mystery.

Jude soon learns that there is more to the award than he’d first realized, and it requires him to complete Valdez’s final masterpiece. But why was he chosen? And can one person ever really know another - let alone complete their work?

What we have here, simply put, is a most alluring, well crafted, elegantly told, bold and exhilarating new prose that is not only part jet-setting thriller, part literary puzzle, and part indictment of corruption in the #MeToo era, but an admirable read that has you dutifully engrossed from the very first page to its final conclusion.

In what is an intimate portrait, a veritable character study of how challenges brought forth to us effect and affect us and those around us, all all generations, You Complete The Masterpiece was obviously written to capture the precarious state of millennial living, of which is still only starting to be accepted.

Interestingly, this book was actually finished back in early 2019, and as the author himself freely admits, it is rather shocking to see that the themes it explores have only become more acute since. The novel depicts a world in which a generation were brought up to realize that the traditional trappings of comfortable living they thought could be achieved through hard work in fact often times require inheritance and the power struggles that come with that.

Its prose of how a struggling author finds the means by which to finally find financial security - by completing the final masterpiece of his favorite author - is one that, sure, drives the book, but does not, in any way, summarize, nay wholly capture the entire essence of what the author’s wider spanning narrative is alluding to re: it’s underlying, at times, emboldened latterly social justice commentary.

Thus, we eagerly follow along as our central character quickly realizes that his heroes own toxic legacy has come to light within his investigation and so has to decide at what moral cost is there to achieving security?

Trust me when I say that You Complete The Masterpiece: A Novel is an engaging page-turner that will have anyone and everyone interested compelled to never put it down until the final page has been turned. It’s just that powerfully good.

About the Author - Dr. Guy Mankowski was lead singer of the band Alba Nova (Comfort Records). He holds a BA (Hons) and M.Phil (in Psychology) and he worked as an Assistant Psychologist at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability in London. His PhD was completed at Northumbria University under the supervision of Andrew Crumey.

He is the author of the novels The Intimates & Letters from Yelena (winner of an Arts Council Literature award and used in GCSE training by Osiris Educational). He also authored How I Left The National Grid, Dead Rock Stars and An Honest Deceit (a New Writing North Read Regional title and winner of a second Arts Council Literature grant, which was adapted for Audible).

His first work of non-fiction was Albion’s Secret History: Snapshots of England’s Pop Rebels and Outsiders, published internationally by Zer0 Books in 2021. His 2022 TEDx talk was entitled Lived Through This: Kristen Pfaff’s hidden archive and influence. His sixth novel, You Complete The Masterpiece was published in 2024.

He is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Lincoln University, UK. He is represented by Matthew Hamilton at The Hamilton Agency, London, for his book and film rights.

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