MAY 2026:
“This story, with its wild human convulsions and its dense moral fibre, demands serious narrative muscle from its teller. James Lasdun has what it takes, and more: his final chapters are a masterclass in calm, hard reasoning.”
― Helen Garner, author of This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial
“The Family Man is a meticulous, spotlessly written, and clear-eyed journey into a distinctly American morass of wealth, privilege, and power. It’s also a morally responsible meditation on the tragedies left within the ruinous wake. James Lasdun doesn’t allow us a moment’s breath to flinch and look away.”
― Paul Tremblay, author of Horror Movie
“James Lasdun, one of our very best true crime documentarians, has written a riveting account of the notorious Alex Murdaugh murder trial of March 2023. Though adjudicated, this public exposure of an ‘incredibly corrupt South Carolina ruling class’ remains a mystery in many ways, as Lasdun reveals. The Family Man is a memorable examination of the making and enabling of a psychopath who is also a ‘good-old-boy’ from a prominent South Carolina family; a ‘family-values’ gentleman who is also a ‘family annihilator.’ Highly recommended.”
― Joyce Carol Oates
“A true-life Gothic tale of moral horror that wrestles with the reality of evil and its sinister, persistent influence over one powerful family and its milieu.”
― Walter Kirn, author of Blood Will Out
Photograph by Tania Barricklo _________________________________________________________________________________
James Lasdun was born in London and now lives in the US. He has published novels, a memoir, collections of poetry, books of short stories, and is the recipient of the 2026 Katherine Anne Porter Award, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His New Yorker article on the Murdaugh case, The Corrupt World Behind the Murdaugh Murders, was the magazine’s most widely read article in 2023. His story The Siege was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his film Besieged. With the director Jonathan Nossiter he co-wrote the films Sunday, which won Best Feature and Best Screenplay awards at Sundance, and Signs and Wonders, starring Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgaard. He is an Executive Producer on the HBO series DTF St Louis, which was inspired by his New Yorker article, My Dentist’s Murder Trial: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/03/my-dentists-murder-trial
His work has been widely translated and won many awards, including an O. Henry Award and the inaugural BBC National Short Story Award. He has been a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the LA Times Book Prize and the Writers Prize (formerly the Rathbones Folio Prize). His first novel, The Horned Man, was a New York Times Notable Book, and his second, Seven Lies, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Critical appraisals of his work include reviews by James Wood in The Guardian and Gabriele Annan in the New York Review of Books.
“James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing…when we read him we know what language is for… Lasdun is a poet, and of course, one would expect, on his part, an enlarged attention to prose. It is easy to forget how very ordinary most contemporary prose-writers are… Lasdun’s prose, by contrast, is neither too fancy nor too regular. It is flexible, rich, metaphorical, and lovely… In sentence after sentence, the reader feels Lasdun’s words shaping and then freely donating a world to us, with great flexible artistry.” — James Wood, The Guardian