Book review: Sunnyside

Gold's "dazzling" debut, the hugely popular Carter Beats the Devil mixed history and fantasy to tell the tale of a lovelorn magician in 1920s America, said Christian House in the Independent. Now he has pulled off a "cane-twirling, bowler-doffing" triumph of an encore.

Sunnyside showcases a much better-known entertainer: Charlie Chaplin. It's an "insanely ambitious", sprawling story, said Aravind Adiga in the FT, of how the US was "knocked into the modern world by two enormous disruptive forces": cinema and the First World War. And if we are sometimes confused by the multiple plot strands, we still keep turning the pages thanks to Gold's "decorative and tensile" writing - "Art Deco steel" fashioned into prose.

There are "breathtaking" moments here, said Patrick Ness in the Guardian. Three paragraphs describing "the treatment of Native American soldiers in France are so piquant and engrossing they could be a novel in themselves".

But the huge cast and Gold's tendency to veer off into whatever subject takes his fancy means that Sunnyside "nearly collapses under its own weight".

Sunnyside, by Glenn David Gould, 576pp (Sceptre, £17.99) The Week Bookshop £16.19 (incl p&p) ·