I just couldn't get on with this. I wanted to like it, I hoped to like it, but nothing grabbed me. At 10% I gave up, I just didn't care enough.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I felt slightly like I was reading an essay at times, and must admit to skimming a few paragraphs here and there. I would have liked to read a bit more about Ben and Lil's relationship as I felt a bit detached from Ben's emotions. The book definitely gave some food for thought about 9/11 attacks, but it felt like the author couldn't decide whether to write a novel or an academic report in places. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't what I expected.

An American Story is an extraordinary book, although it's hard to pin down why in a review, or indeed to pin it down at all. I think that's the point.

Part thriller, part love story, part examination of loss and grief, part history, this book revolves around the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the USA. It's not science fiction or fantasy - I wondered if Priest would use that to get at the reality (or realities?) behind 9/11 but I don't think he does. (There is one tantalising moment when a character seems to remember something that she shouldn't know, and I wondered if that might suggest, I don't know, deeper workings going on here but, characteristically, this moment is given to a character whose memory is damaged and I take it more as a hint of collective uncertainty, of the reshaping of history and truth, than as a fantastical plot development.

At one level, this story is a simple quest for the truth. Journalist Ben Matson lost his lover Lil in the attacks - lost in the truest sense of the word, as her body was never found, her very movements, even the reasons for those movements obscured among the events of that day. Thesis foreshadowed in an early scene where she and Ben argue over airline flights and meeting points. It's a little bit shifty, one thinks, what is going on here? Whatever the facts, it is a loss Ben lives with, which becomes almost more concrete fact than its cause. Again, this backward chaining of effects to causes is a central theme of the book.

Despite his grieving, Ben does eventually find a new partner, Jeanne, with whom he has a son and the present of the book in centred on their lives, looking back at 9/11 and its aftermath, so that the book is set between 2001 and a point several years in our future, when Ben is reminded of what happened to Lil by a new discovery. That's where the thriller elements kick in with Watergate-toned "Deep Throat" moments, encounters with the shadier branches of the US Government, covert meetings and a general atmosphere of threat.

But it isn't really a thriller. In particular we don't get a neat ending or conclusion. Ben has become convinced that something is wrong with the official narrative about 9/11, but he's not trying to nail the guilty or discover the truth except in one very personal sense: he wants to know what really happened to Lil. So don't expect Mission: Impossible style theatrics - this is as much Ben's quest into himself as it is an interrogation of the outside world.

Indeed, from a certain perspective not a lot actually happens, at least in the "present", at least until the very end of the book, with much of the story recounting how things got there. In keeping with that, Priest's writing is restrained, domestic, recording Ben's and Jeanne's lives, the challenges posed when her mother Lucinda becomes infirm and must stay at their house on the island of Bute and their delicate, compromise-filled days (which include negotiating the tricky question of Lil and of Ben's continuing interest in her death). These parts are never dry, filled with insight about how two people organise their lives, their feelings, around each other. Not everything needs to be said, and Priest almost lovingly creates a world around the two.

Yet into even the most domestic moments come noirish moments, consequences, incursions of the wrong. "We were all in the dark, in the shadow of 9/11, victims, or remnants of victims, losers of our lovers, relatives, inadvertent characters in the story that insidiously weaved through and around our lives, untrue, unreliable, irrational and, as yet unfinished"

The book becomes most thriller-like when Ben has to visit London for work and we see the state to which England has fallen post Brexit. It's not nice - Scotland is now independent, London has become a security-ridden hellhole best by CCTV, armed guards and immigration police. Or when he makes trips to the US. Here, jangling details stoke the tension - details of hotel rooms, flights, ordinary things like a car running low on charge or the junk dumped behind a hotel.

Through all this, we keep circling back to 9/11, to Ben's initial doubts and his subsequent investigation. Priest lays out some of the awkward evidence and theories about planes that weren't there, demolition charges, missing bodies, missing flight data recorders and so forth. This is all very well researched and preoccupies Ben to a point where Jeanne becomes worried about him. Ben's conviction that something is off is bolstered by meetings with shadowy insiders and possibly even with guilty parties. There is, for example, the mathematician Kyril Tatarov whose ideas about the manipulation of truth via media seem to foreshadow the "fake news" familiar today. Tatarov is an enigmatic figure, obsessed with a "Thomas theorem" (which is a real thing) that (if I have understood it correctly) reasons backward from effect to cause. As I have said, i think that's a central concern of this book, with world events since 2001 seen as the consequence, and the events of 9/11, whatever they were - if, the books seems to say, it's even possible to say what they were - the cause.

The book doesn't come to neat and tidy conclusions. As I have said, it's ultimately not a thriller. There is no revelation of what "really happened", much of the speculation is mutually inconsistent while partial truths are uncovered they don't add up to a complete, alternative narrative. Instead we are left, as is Ben, to worry about the future and about where it will all lead. That is, I think, actually the only tolerable conclusion to this story. There is room for doubt, perhaps, about the events of 9/11, about the official story, but what there isn't room for is the certainty of an alternative account which purports to be "the truth".

Bringing the story to a successful conclusion despite the degree of doubt shows Priest working at his very best. It would have been so easy to let the book sag into despairing cynicism or to set set up some other false certainty by validating conspiracy theories outright but he avoids this, keeping the story mostly personal, looking at the consequences of real actions on his fictional characters. The book ends on a questioning note, though an oddly helpful one.

I will end my review with a quote from Prof Tatarov himself. Speaking of the young men and women busily obscuring history, he says - and it sums up, I think, the central accusation of this book:

"They believe in interpretations, not reporting. They praise opinions, but they despise facts . They talk of actions, whereas they are merely noticing the consequences of other people's actions."

The story of Ben Matson and his exploration into how he lost his girlfriend during 9/11, An American Story explores themes such as love and conspiracy theories.

The way book is written as almost a stream of consciousness, can be a little offputting at first as it feels almost tangential, however I think it adds to the personality of the book as it continues, giving us what Ben is going through, what he is thinking and what is going on throughout the book.

The plot unravels well, but the whole conspiracy thing feels like a book trying to say something and not really working it out well. This book is certainly well researched when it comes to the subject at hand but sometimes it can feel like it goes down an internet rabbit hole.

The story of Ben and Lil is nice, but overall, I just liked it.

An exploration of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, An American Story is narrated by Ben Matson, a features writer who specialises in scientific and mathematical issues. His link to 9/11 is that his girlfriend Lil was on flight American 77 which crashed into the Pentagon – but she’s not on any passenger lists, and her estranged husband is high up in the Defence Department; Ben tries to fit all the facts together and finds he can’t.

I was enjoying the story of Ben and Lil, but felt this book turned too much into a conspiracy-theorist’s perfect story, and I got quite frustrated with this as it wasn't what I was expecting from the blurb.

Christopher Priest’s last few novels have settled into a disconcerting pattern of late. Always well-written, his books are known for a preciseness of prose where every word and sentence counts (even when you do not realise it.) What he then does is stealthily construct a world of truths and half-truths, of twisted versions of reality which read so well that they often deceive.

I see it as a peculiarly British thing, where major events are downplayed or given as a matter of fact, so much so that you sometimes don’t realise what has been said or written until you go back and read it again. Christopher is a master of this deception and sideswiping, capable of creating a charming response to someone’s face whilst at the same time knifing them in the ribs.

In The Adjacent (2013), he managed to muddle space-time, make England part of the Islamic Republic of Great Britain and destroy Notting Hill. In The Gradual (2016), he examined the consequences of time travel in the fictional setting of his own making, The Dream Archipelago. This time around, he’s again travelling the timelines and telling a tale that will be memorable to many, set in the near future and at various times in the near past (although for me it’s hard to think that it has been nearly twenty years.)

As has become typical in a Priest tale, the story is told in the first person from someone who may be an unreliable narrator. Set in the near future, Ben Matson is a freelance science and mathematics writer whose story flits from a time when Scotland has separated itself from Britain to become part of Europe and the streets of London have armed police on the streets, to real events of nearly two decades ago.

On the surface, it is a story that begins with Ben narrating how he is reminded, when reading an obituary of a famous if somewhat aloof Russian mathematician, of Lil, an American ex-girlfriend who seems to have been killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA.

“Reimagining the real incident as an invented one brought home to me the relevance of fiction, of telling a story, when the truth is inconvenient, too complicated to explain or is simply something you wish to hide. Stories can be told.”

As this is a Christopher Priest story, it is not long before seemingly disparate events diffuse and are connected. What Chris does supremely well is set running a series of stories at different places in time which are charming and disarming but over the course of a novel combine and intertwine. They are written in such a way that they seem real, even if they may not necessarily be. To me they often seem like a literary equivalent of the traditional “shaggy-dog story” where things seem to happen all over and never end where you think they will.

Much of the fun of reading a Priest novel is trying to work out the connections, to join the dots, as it were. In his novels, Christopher often plays with the ideas of reality, of things being not what we think. Once again, when reading, we question the reliability of the narrator and the narrative.

“It was the first act of fictionalising, one that would lead to many more.”

And what works is that Chris embeds these untruths in such a normal-sounding narrative that the reader is lulled into complacency, where everything seems ordinary, but is not.

Along the way we discover more about Lil and her ex-husband, about lies and half-truths and enough conspiracy theories about what happened on the 11th September 2001 to make even the most cynical reader wonder what happened. (Chris points out his research at the end of the novel, and although he is not a believer in such things, points out where such things are discussed.)

By the end, things are resolved, and what seemed unimportant becomes more significant than we realise.  The ending, like the solution to a puzzle, has been there all the time, and you realise that Chris has done it again.

For some readers this may be a difficult read. I must admit reading it brought back memories from that day, as if it was yesterday, not nearly two decades ago. Chris does well to describe those emotions of confusion and incomprehension that existed for the next few days - I remember that it was a tough day on the Forums as well as across the world, and this book reminds you of that.

But what it also does is what any good book should do – it makes the reader think, raises issues (here on security and the nature of freedom) and is both thoughtful and entertaining at the same time. This is one that I keep thinking about after I’ve read it.

Along with everyone else across the world, I watched the TV all day on 9/11, horrified by the events playing out before my eyes. Along with everyone else, I have been equally horrified by events in the Middle East over the almost two decades since 2001. Never have I questioned, though, the official version of 9/11, what happened and who was responsible, nor have I been aware of the conspiracy theories out there. This novel and the research it is based on suggests that not everything should be taken at face value. It points out inconsistencies that may not necessarily be sinister but are certainly worrying. All very interesting.

'When authorities crave control they are motivated by the wish not to answer for their actions. It moves them into dark areas. Taking control, or trying to, leads inevitably to censorship, which in turn leads to the temptations of manipulation. When the motive is malign, facts and known events are no longer empirical. They can be downgraded into theories, suspicions, lies, alleged conspiracies. They can be redacted. History itself falls into doubt. Excuses for the mistakes or misjudgments of those in power can be made, coverups for their wrongdoing can be spread, prejudices can be sanctioned, imagined threats can be treated as real, wars can be started.'

As I see it, the author’s main message is that after the 9/11 Commission published its report in 2004, the case was closed, the ‘war on terror’ progressed and

'the consequences of the 9/11 attacks had become deemed to be more important than the original events. The unreliable quality of our knowledge of the original events was no longer relevant. The need to interpret the consequences had become greater than the need to understand the cause.'

There is a second discussion going on here about the influence of social media on public understanding of world events.

'Before the real world was affected by the introduction of social media ….. relatively few people, a self-appointed but intelligent elite, have had access to the means of distribution. These were the artists, writers, journalists, philosophers, academics, politicians, and so on. The few spoke to the many. In doing so they helped shape the society in which the many lived. Now because of the internet, the many speak freely to the many. Facts have been replaced by opinions. They are unmediated and are therefore malleable, changeable.'

'…dialogue between voices of equal, untested value constitutes a fundamental shift in the nature and use of facts, and the weight we should give to an alleged fact. Opinion is clearly more attractive to ordinary people than the reporting of facts, and contains its own dynamic.'

That is my interpretation of some of the background to the fictional story we follow here of Ben Matson trying to establish what happened to his girlfriend that day and turning up more than he expected.

I’ve been thinking about it for some time since I finished the book and I’m not sure it worked for me as a novel. My main problem was with the characters. I couldn’t really believe in Lil and the relationship between Lil and Ben. I also had difficulty with the wealth of coincidences in the story - to detail them here would be to spoil things for others but it went beyond my personal tolerance as to how many seemingly unconnected characters and places can be revealed to be connected.

So I’m giving it 3 stars - a vehicle for some thought-provoking ideas but a thin and unengaging story. A pity for me since I’ve been a fan of the author’s writing since I first read and loved ‘The Glamour’ at least 30 years ago.

With thanks to Orion/Gollancz for the opportunity to read an ARC.

Loved this book. It takes you back to the confusion and chaos of 9/11 then spins mystery and intrigue as what the protagonist thought happened starts to un-ravel.

The author drops you straight into Ben's life post 9/11 then slowly pulls apart what he believed happened to his fiancée.

Well written and compelling