Rupert Thomson is generally acknowledged to be one of the finest literary stylists now working in the United Kingdom. Since the publication of his first novel he has been consistently lauded by reviewers for the brilliance of his prose, which is most often characterized as "lyrical" or "poetic" and is scattered with striking, unusual, and sometimes risky images, such as the description of twilight in London in his first book, Dreams of Leaving (1987):

Moses shaded his eyes. There was a big bucket in the sky at the end of the King's Road. This bucket was overflowing with molten gold light. The light was called sunset, and this is how it worked. The bucket slowly emptied of light. As the bucket emptied, the light slowly darkened--gold to orange, orange to red, red to purple--until, after hours of pouring, only the sediment remained: black light or, in other words, night...